Lisa M. Keefe 2025-07-26 09:45:12
BILL AIMUTIS
TITLE:
Co-director, Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein, NC State
EDUCATION:
BS in Food Science, Purdue University; Ph.D., Food Science and Technology, Virginia Tech
CAREER JOURNEY:
17 years at Cargill in food research and “external innovation.” Executive director of the North Carolina Food Innovation Lab in Kannapolis, NC, beginning 2018. Codirector and COO, Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein at NC State, beginning May 2024.
AND WHILE HE WAS AT IT:
Nearing two dozen patents in the U.S. Received the Distinguished Agriculture Alumni Award from Purdue in 2002. Is a Fellow of the Institute of Food Technologists
THE FIRST BEZOS CENTER FOR SUSTAINABLE PROTEIN OPENED AT NC STATE A YEAR AGO. WHAT HAS IT ACCOMPLISHED, AND WHAT PLANS ARE ON THE BOOKS FOR THE YEAR TO COME? CO-DIRECTOR WILLIAM R. AIMUTIS FILLS US IN.
Capping a long career in proteins, Bill Aimutis is the outgoing director of the North Carolina Food Innovation Lab (NCFIL) as well as co-director of the Bezos Center at NC State. The latter provides him with the biggest stage yet for helping to build a global alternative protein ecosystem and ensure that humankind will have enough to eat in just a few decades hence.
Alt-Meat spoke with Aimutis about the center’s first year and plans for the next few.
Alt-Meat: You are the director — or soon-to-be ex-director — of the North Carolina Food Innovation Lab. How does the Bezos Center fit into the overall organizational ecosystem? Where is its focus?
WILLIAM R. AIMUTIS: The Bezos Center is a separate entity, funded by the Bezos Earth Fund to be focused on, in our case, biomanufacturing. We’re one of three global centers, the others being in London and Singapore.
Part of the reason we were chosen at NC State is that we have a good ecosystem in our state, between the Biotechnology Education Center we have on campus, the Plant Science Initiative, which is a major undertaking that was launched about three years ago. And then the North Carolina Food Innovation Lab, which started six years ago and has been focused on working with entrepreneurs in the plant-based food space. About 50% of our projects involve proteins, whether that’s characterizing emerging proteins or working with entrepreneurs that have a product, helping them scale it up and launch it into the marketplace.
We work closely with the Good Food Institute, both from the NCFIL perspective as well as the Bezos Center. So they are part of our ecosystem also.
But the bigger picture here in North Carolina is Believer Meats building a major manufacturing facility for cultivated meat. Our biotechnology industry continues to grow in North Carolina, of course, and for a long time it was focused just on biopharma. Now we’ve started seeing it move toward ag tech, and even some food tech from the precision fermentation perspective. So the ecosystem continues to grow.
We have about 30 companies right now that are interested in joining a consortium that we’re starting to put together, and that will be part of the ecosystem, too, which could operate in conjunction with the Bezos Center. If a company wants to fund research on a project that we have at the Bezos Center, Food Innovation Lab or any one of our other centers on campus, we can work our way toward research agreements from that perspective.
Alt-Meat: There are three Bezos Centers worldwide, each of which has its focus so that they are complementary to one another. Tell me how cooperation happens among the three labs across the planet.
AIMUTIS: The specific focus of the Bezos Center at NC State will be biomanufacturing. Our focus is on improving the processes all the way from the lab bench, through the pilot plant, into full scale production.
We have three pillars, beyond research and development. We’re also engaged in workforce development and identifying stakeholders. We are into some deep consumer science, and then we are also involved in policy and advocacy.
As we look ahead, the university obviously can’t lobby legislators, but we certainly can educate their legislative aides and hopefully the people who are making the laws for the future. We have some goals there where we’ll write some white papers and single-page pieces to help inform the variety of stakeholders that we’re identifying. Stakeholders can be everything from farmers to agricultural commodity groups. It can be legislators, local government, service clubs. So we have a big task in that education workforce development piece.
Of the three, our center, in particular, is probably a little bit deeper into all those areas than the other two. But all three centers will work on plant-based, precision fermentation and cell cultivation projects. That was one of the requirements of the Bezos Earth Fund.
Alt-Meat: So each center will have programs that address each of the three technologies?
AIMUTIS: That’s correct. The center at the Imperial College of London is working on the engineering of the cell. That will mean quite a bit of genetic engineering as well as gene editing, and also understanding the metabolism of the organisms that we’re working with, whether they’re mammalian cells or bacterial cells or fungi in some cases.
Then the Singapore facility will be focused on the emerging proteins, doing quite a bit with mycobacterium, fungi and algae, and some of the other emerging things that are coming along.
But we all three have a separate charter and will hopefully be able to take learnings from all three and bring it together to accelerate the commercial launch and proliferation of the consumption of these alternate meat products in the future.
Alt-Meat: If you’re working with somebody stateside looking at emerging proteins, you would be able to connect them with somebody in Singapore who might have the advice or the latest data on that?
AIMUTIS: Correct.
Alt-Meat: The North Carolina State Bezos Center was the first one established. What have you done so far? And what are you working on now?
AIMUTIS: Some of our research projects have been launched, including some on media formulations. We’ve looked at some cell scaffolding opportunities. We’ve been looking at sensors and digital twinning so that we can basically go from a small scale to a larger, full-scale operation.
One of our big projects right now is a ‘large drivers of liking’ survey with consumers, trying to understand what they like about the plant-based chicken nugget and beef crumble alternatives that are out there. And now we’re taking it back into the laboratory at NCFIL to understand the textural differences and other little nuances that might give us some indication about what it is the consumer really enjoys about these products and what it is they don’t enjoy.
Alt-Meat: Is the consumer research done specifically with North American consumers?
AIMUTIS: We actually had the opportunity to discuss recently how the other Centers can take what we’ve started here in North America and start using it in the UK, Europe and Asia. One of our plans as we move forward over the next couple of months is to put our sensory people together with the sensory people at Imperial College and National University of Singapore so that we have a global database of these consumer inputs.
Alt-Meat: NCFIL is hands-on with the companies that you work with, but it sounds like the Bezos Center is more research-oriented.
AIMUTIS: I would say, we’re more focused on research than on the product development side. For example, if we’re doing work in a specific medium to grow a cell cultivated cell line at the Bezos Center, then it’s probably a little bit of product development and putting together that unique media that we’re looking at. Whereas, if we’re looking at products that actually get launched into the consumer space, much of that work will fall back to either partners in the consortia or to NCFIL’s work that they’re doing with other entrepreneurs today.
Alt-Meat: What else are you doing with the companies themselves, in terms of getting buy-in with your initiatives?
AIMUTIS: The industry needs are important for us to understand. We’ve already held a couple of listening sessions with some of our industry stakeholders to understand where they’re having challenges as they try to scale these products up and reduce some of their costs. We’ve initiated several programs that will also assist our industry partners, including things like internships and exchanges.
One of the things that we’ve discovered is a lot of new companies haven’t brought on many people from the food production industry. It’s a lot of biopharma people or engineers, and they’ve forgotten some of the real basics of food science. We can help with that education piece.
There’s an organization that has asked us to come in and teach a fourhour course. We will also be offering some micro and minor certificate programs in things like, how do you run a fermenter? How do you run a bioreactor? How do you make sure that the food safety pieces are there? Our consortium partners will have some of the first opportunities for these various programs that we’re putting together.
Alt-Meat: What’s next on the agenda?
AIMUTIS: We’ve spent some time with all of our research teams trying to educate them on how to work as an interdisciplinary team, to begin with. We’ve been bringing some new science to the whole area of interdisciplinary team research so that everybody knows what’s going on across the board. Even if you’re working on workforce development, you’ll understand what’s going on in the R&D programs, or vice versa.
The other piece we did with our researchers early on is we made them all sit through a course on innovation and being able to recognize when a technology can be patented. We wanted to make sure that we protected any intellectual property coming out of this.
We’ve also reached out to several commodity groups and even groups that people would consider to be a little bit of an adversary with us, like the American Meat Institute or the National Cattlemen’s Association. Our perspective is that they are not our enemies, but we do need to have some conversations about how we work together as we look ahead to the year 2040. It’s about food security more than it is about market capture.
As I’ve talked to farmers the past seven months since we’ve started this, once we explain it to them, they understand it from a food security perspective. They don’t necessarily like it, but they do understand it. The fear of putting animal agriculture out of business is diminished, at least at the farmer level. I think we’re still working on some of the commodity groups and the big institutions like American Meat Institute and the National Cattlemen’s Association. We’re also talking to the pork producers and the poultry federations also.
Alt-Meat: This whole industry, I think, sort of got off on a hostile footing and it’s something that continues to thwart what could be some tremendous opportunities up to this day, but I hope that going forward, there can be a little less rhetoric and a little more cooperation.
AIMUTIS: That’s the position we have taken. And we’ve had opportunities to talk to some of the larger regulatory agencies here in the U.S., trying to get some perspective on what they’re seeing strategically that our country is probably going to be doing in the alt-meat space, and again more particularly into food security, looking ahead.
Alt-Meat: Out of all of this, what are your personal goals for the research aimed at alt-meats in particular? What do you personally hope to get out of this?
AIMUTIS: My personal goal is the fact that, as we look ahead to the year 2040, we know there’s going to be a protein deficit, and because of that, we need to find alternatives to the way we’re doing things today, and that includes being able to produce these alternative meat products.
The other thing that drives me a little bit is the fact that we want to make sure that as we develop these new products, we want to be able to show that nutritional equivalency and food safety are of utmost concern. There’s a lot of pressure on the food industry today. With the amount of ultra processing that occurs with some of these products, including some of the alt-meat products, we must really align our programs so that we’re putting out the most nutritious, safe product and can guarantee that every time the consumer eats the product.
The other thing that I’ve been quite excited about is that there are several emerging countries that will be consuming more protein over the next 10 years. And a lot of those countries come out of Africa, and they come out of the Far East and Southeast Asia. Their protein supply is in dire straits. They really are looking for alternative protein products.
I think we need to turn our focus a little bit from that word ‘alternative’ to just being delicious foods that are ‘proteinacious’ and supplying the needs for sustenance on the planet.
Alt-Meat: What are your goals for the next one to five years for your Bezos Center?
AIMUTIS: Right now, we’re trying to reduce the cost of producing these products. We’re trying to minimize the amount of processing that is being used. A lot of these products are using very sophisticated equipment that’s typically found in the biopharma industry. We will never get to cost parity if we continue to use equipment that’s priced two to three times more than the cost of food grade equipment.
The other piece of this, of course, is, as we improve our manufacturing processes, we look at ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our plants but also the amount of water we’re utilizing, and then how we’re putting that water back into the earth. And we’re looking at minimizing some of the packaging things that are also impacting sustainability.
The food industry, even the meat industry, has caught some serious grief from environmentalists, and probably appropriately in some cases. But I think the progress that has been made even on the animal side over the past five to 10 years has shown us that we can raise animals and mitigate some of the challenges we have from an environmental sustainability perspective. But certainly, as we start utilizing cell cultivation and precision fermentation, we can even improve upon that.
©Marketing & Technology Group. View All Articles.
A BEZOS-SIZED FOOTPRINT
https://library.alt-meat.net/articles/a-bezos-sized-footprint