Interview with Joshua March, SCiFi Foods
Joshua March is Co-founder and CEO of SCiFi Foods, a startup creating transformational products by combining cultivated meat with plant-based ingredients to make burgers shockingly close to the taste of conventional beef.
What are you excited about in terms of SCiFi Foods at the moment?
We just started construction on our pilot plant, in the East Bay, which will allow us to go through regulatory approval and commercialize our first cultivated beef products! This is super exciting, and the culmination of the last few years of work where we’ve run faster than anyone else in the world to develop beef cell lines that can be scaled up in standard stir-tank bioreactors.
This has only been possible because of our synbio approach, and I’m excited to continue seeing the benefits of this approach as we develop better and better cell line performance.
What do you think the future holds for the cell-cultured meat industry?
In the last four months, we've seen the first two companies gain FDA approval here in the US—and I believe this is just the onset of many more to come (ourselves included). For the industry to succeed, however, will take a lot of consumer education, policy cooperation, and chef enthusiasm, but I do believe this is the future.
Plant-based products introduced the notion to the world that perhaps we should be changing our eating habits, and now cultivated meat will bring an authentic taste that can help push this idea to a more massively adopted—and lasting—audience.
What advice do you have for people that want to join the alternative meat space?
Do your research. Whether you're looking to start your own company, join one full time, or invest in one, the biggest service you can do for yourself is thoroughly research both the space and companies in it. Educate yourself on the different types of science being used, why, what they mean and allow companies to do, and the different types of meat being produced. And ask questions to those who have been in this area a long time.
Before you try anything new, it's always good to have a strong general knowledge of the arena, the people and companies in it, and the risks/rewards involved.
What motivates you?
As a serial entrepreneur, I started SCiFi Foods because I felt it was time to do a company with a larger and longer-lasting impact on the planet. And as a new father, seeing reports of climate change every day and what it's doing to the planet, I'm doubly motivated to also drive my company forward to leave a better world for my daughter.
Dr Kasia Gora (my co-founder) and I also have a really wonderful work relationship and motivate each other.
What food trends or innovations do you think we’ll be seeing more of in the next year?
I'm not sure if this will happen or not, but I do hope we start to see more transparency in food labels.
Many certifications are more bought than earned and It'd be nice if consumers were able to trust food packaging, especially given how much they're having to spend at the grocery store today with inflation levels of the last two years. This is partly why we changed our name to SCiFi Foods and also why we ran an LCA (with peer review by scientific journal/publication). We always want to be open and authentic as a food brand. And we hope more companies begin choosing this path, too.