Research this, once we explain it to them, they understand it from a food security per-spective. 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 work-ing 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. 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 indus-try. 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 that as we develop these new prod-ucts, 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 prod-ucts, 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 consum-er eats the product. The other thing that I’ve been quite excited about is that there are sev-eral 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 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 environ-mental sustainability perspective. But certainly, as we start utilizing cell cultivation and precision fermentation, we can even improve upon that. Alt-Meat August 2025 Alt-Meat: This whole industry, I think, sort of got off on a hostile foot-ing and it’s something that continues to thwart what could be some tremen-dous 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 opportu-nities 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. They've forgotten some of the real basics of food science. Alt-Meat: Out of all of this, what are your personal goals for the re-search aimed at alt-meats in partic-ular? 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 35
Alt-Meat August 2025: Page 35
