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Eshchar Ben-Shitrit

lines on the record: 39
first: 2023-09-28
most recent: 2023-09-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And the question is who's going to do it? Somebody has to do it. We don't have a choice. It's inevitable in the sense that the plant needs it and animal needs it and human needs. And I don't see a lot of companies that have this ambition because it's really tough. It's a tough journey to do what we're doing. But the potential is so amazing. The potential is so unique, so incredible. It's something we would tell our grandkids about. So this is what drives us. And five years from now is just the beginning. So we started six years ago, five years from now is 11 years in. for the world's biggest meat company, it's just the beginning. Thank you guys. Enjoyed a lot, and thank you. It's an honor.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Five years from now, we're already a big meat company. We have a presence in Europe in basically every restaurant that you can imagine because food service is a market that we dominate and we are in all the nationwide retailers with our meat range and our steak. And we have sizable business in the USA from restaurants in retail. But the idea is if you look even 10 years from now, out of the 20 biggest meat companies around the world, one company or two company for sure will not rely on animals. This I have no doubt. And we want to be the first one to reach there, to have a meat business that is the distribution of meat that is found everywhere, that consumers enjoy the product that are very healthy and very sustainable, like a meat company without the animal that is slaughter. And it's a very, very challenging task because the big meat companies have been around for 100 years. But some point of time, meat companies will not rely on animals.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, so we are very lucky. We invest a lot in technology and our technology is very, very complicated. But we chose a very simple set of ingredients that allowed us with a new technology to reach good scale and revenue quite fast. So we're actually selling and on the individual level product, we are profitable. The key is how much scale we need to be profitable as a company and how much we want to invest in future technology. And by being in the market and growing every month and investing in technology, we can increase the addition, the addressable market that we have. So it's not 10 years, it's two years from now.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Equipment is inefficient as we grow with that will become cheaper in our production and we can lower the price and we can easily become at small scale cheaper than meat and meat today has massive scale, massive trillions of dollars of scale and we're talking about tens of millions of dollars to reach a relatively decent scale and lower price point.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Comparable to high quality stake, and the quality is not there yet. So it's a little bit a premium for the relative level of quality because the value that we bring is not just the price. So when people consume redefined meat, they want to experience something that doesn't come from an animal that is more sustainable, that is more healthy, and they're willing to pay a small premium, not huge. It's not double the price. It's about 20, 30 percent more expensive. And we have limited capacity. Actually, our cost of ingredients, so the cost of our input, unlike meat, is very low because meat cows consume about 25 kilogram of feed for every kilogram of meat. And we actually use about 30% of ingredient to make a kilo of meat, and the rest is water. So on that regard, we're very efficient. Because we operate in a small scale, everything related to automation, to packaging, to capital.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With the products, including our steaks, and then gradually grow until we reach also to the USA and then follow the same path. First restaurants, then retail.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eventually, in order to become the world's biggest meat company, we need to be everywhere that meat is found. But we think that the way to reach consumers and the way to improve our products is through restaurants. So as we improve our product and we improve our scale, we start to sell more and more to consumers directly. In Israel, we're already there. So in Israel, you can buy a range of our product in basically every store. And in Europe, it will take a little bit more time. First, we're still building the recognition of our quality and the value of what we're bringing in restaurants. And we have a lot more work to do. And we're building capacity because it's a new technology. And we develop our own formulations and products and also machinery. And it takes us time and it takes money. And we have a lot of demand for our products and not enough capacity. So we rather work with the Mishnasar restaurant and the caterers. Somewhere next year, a year from now, we'll start rolling out to more retailers in Europe.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The beef there and the way people consume beef, even a burger in France is a st ⁇ cach ⁇, not eaten in a bun, eating with a knife and fork. So it's more difficult to compete with our burger that is better than some of the burgers that are served in Israel in a meat restaurant. So that is the real focus. The real focus is how do you find a benchmark? That every time that our product improves addresses much more consumers. So Angus Steak, which is, let's say, what a lot of people in America love, we're not there yet. Once we have an Angus steak and Angus raby, which is a year from now, we can go to US mainstream stakeholders.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, of course, we cannot compete in a blind tasting, and we want. We believe that in three years from now, we can also provide a weg U beef with the same level of marbling, the same level of tenderness and richness of flavor. So that is our aim. Our aim is to constantly increase the benchmark of how do we compete. So Israeli beef, actually okay one is not the best in the world. In many cases, especially high-tech companies that we work with, they substitute meat with redefined meat. They say the meat that we buy, your meat is already even better. Of course, much more healthy and much more sustainable. But when we go to friends, for example,”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Question is more what is the benchmark? So today, if we do a blind testing to all of our products, we can choose an okay meat, including a steak that consumers will not tell the difference. But the problem is that if you go to a steakhouse, the steakhouse where we are served, we are in a place called beef bar in multiple countries around the world. And the beef bar serves where you meet. So the highest price meat should be printed.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and also meat is so diverse, and even beef, think about beef, you eat not only short rib and maybe you don't like short rib or you happen to like short rib, but what about the tender law and the rebuy? What about a very fatty marbled ribi? What about a very lean kind of skirt steak that is very bloody? So meat is not a single product. Beef is not a product. Beef is a world of different cultures, different supply chains. And they are all complicated and they're all tasty and all have different consumers that want them. By the way, you know what's the problem with the dish that you ate? The product was meant to be a steak. We wanted people to serve it as a steak and to take it into short rib, but it performs really well there. So the next version of that was how we are not only doing this fibrous chewiness of short rib, but how can the product stands alone on the plate?”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we told them, just tell us the honest truth. Not only, by the way, Marco is incredible, he's also poetic, and he has this philosophy around the world. Ron is breeding in combining flavor. But every cook in every catering that we work with has a lot of criticism on our product and we listen. We don't say, no, no, you're mistaken. We say, okay, maybe in the next version, we actually need to add some more bite and some more fat and to make the flavors more natural”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there are two reasons. One is humility. So in plant-based meat, there's a lot of companies, including some of my friends, I say we have a perfect replacement for meat. You have the same texture, the same flavor, everything that you expect from meat. And then you take a bite and you see what is the distance. So we say meat is incredible. Meat is so amazing. It's been developed through millions of years of evolution. So assuming that we are already there, we're not there. The second, the passion to really listen. So when we came to Marco Perwite, when he came to Ron Blau, by the way, very early on in the process, we told him, take a bite, tell us what's wrong in this product. Don't tell us how amazing it is. Let's start selling it in all of your restaurants. Just be a partner on making this really great. And we did it with them, but we also went to butchers. We also went to the people that know intimately this connection between meat and the consumer.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a big pivot, but it happened in one minute that basically created a new, more like a business aspiration to the company. We were speaking with one of the largest beef companies in the world with the management team. And we had a presentation about our technology and what we're doing. And they asked me, so how can we collaborate? And I told them, you know, actually we don't want to collaborate with you. We want to be you. And they said, what do you mean? We told him, yeah, we want to be the world's largest meat company. And they stopped and they applauded. They say, okay, that's the way of thinking. And when we came out to this meeting, we started saying to everybody, we're going to become the world's biggest meat company. This is what we're going to do. And if you're the world biggest meat company, you're not selling the technology. You're selling meat.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was very, very encouraging to see consumer reaction, kids. I remember there's a nice video of a mother giving her kid a bite of her product. And then I told her, you know, it's made from plant, the steak, actually the steak. And she told me, don't tell him what is an actual steak. He doesn't know what he's eating And of course investors saw that it's not only a technological promise of patents and a mush, it's something that people are now starting to eat and get excited about. And then we raise more money and also started working more with chefs. Once we were more confident, we started going to these mission star chefs and butchers.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a little bit more advanced than that. We found collaboration with a flavor company that is called Givodan, an amazing strategic partner. And we were able to develop this gush of blood that when you put in your mouth tastes like what comes out of steak. And we were able to show the steak and explain once we combine those together, you will have this experience of biting through fibers and having juiciness created. That was the seed round. And then when we, in COVID, before we launch, we did this large scale tasting. So we gave one about 1,000 people in two days blind tasting of some products, some were minced meat, so some were not using additive manufacturing, but it was the first time we gave people a steak.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so at some point in time, the CDRN we actually raised on the blood just the fact that our blood component was very, very tasty and very impressive.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On demand, no waste, just in time, personalize your stake. We had the habit of demoing people a steak that they would cut and their name will be inside. They couldn't eat it because it wasn't tasty, but it was very impressive that we can control the shape of the steak from the outside and from the inside”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is something new. This is a new property of food that we can create by this combination of 3D printing and the different components that we had. And then we accelerated things because at that point of time it was very clear. It was very exciting, and we thought that that's it. That's our job is done. We filed a patent for that. And we thought that's easy. Now, only thing we need to do, like six more months in a lab, and then we will sell a 3D printer to every restaurant around the world.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first thing we needed a lab, I have a friend that worked with me in HP that his family operates labs that you can rent. And they gave us a lab for almost free and we set up shop there. And then we started just sourcing, buying every protein, every flavor compound, every fat that we can, and building a 3D printer that can manipulate these products. So we built our own printer. We built a machine from scratch. And we tried to build different structures and see how the different structure impacts your experience, the flavor. So how this element of 3D printing can manipulate something in food. We didn't try to make a mistake. We didn't try to make something tasty. Wanted to see what kind of things we can create with 3D printing that the normal food company cannot develop. And the first thing that we developed were not tasty and they were not meaty, but they showed anybody from food science.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the second is our CTO that has a background in tissue engineering. So he made meet in the lab. And then he went to 3D printing. And all of these people, they really, really care about the planet. So they all eat meat. They all actually love meat. But they care about the planet and care about doing something that has an impact far beyond just technology and a business. And when we told them the story, they quit really, really great jobs and joined us. That's amazing, that's something that can happen in Israel, especially when you combine technology and sustainability.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did something very Israel. We didn't have money. So we hired young people that would help us learn something new that had an interesting background. So we hired a food engineer, a 3D printing guy, a maker, and a chef. This was the team. And it wasn't the team to crack the technology for the long term. But it's the team to understand what are our gaps, what are we missing. And then this team is amazing. They're still in the company. We found two people. One is our VP of research and development. And he's a physicist, so not related to food. But he actually knows how to take wild technological ideas and make them into reality.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How did you know? How do you know all the secrets? So I had this intuition that is true, that meat is comprised of muscle, fat, and blood. And I try to develop the muscle, fat, and blood separately. So I took soy protein I bought in a health store soy protein and some pure gluten and some pea protein and I tried to blend it with Beetroot and I made the fat out of coconut fat and I took water and beetroot and some flavors like soy sauce and I called it blood and then manually I injected layer by layer even one of those creations I posted on a Facebook group of meat lovers and I said this is our this is my rump steak what do you think about my rum steak it was inedible it was not something you can eat but but when I show this to people I don't think they were excited about the technology or the levels of sophistication but I saw I have some crazy ability to follow a wide idea”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's totally different business, and also I didn't have experience as a technologies. I had an experience in conferences, making presentation. And the first few months playing in my kitchen, actually squeezing different protein stuff out of syringes to emulate 3D printing. And I even bought a 3D printer for quite a lot of money out of my pocket that I didn't know how to operate for six months was a very, very immature way of starting a business. But it was also fun and also was very honest because I thought that by this creation in the garage, I will come up with a revolution that will change the world. But if naive beginning led to something serious that we didn't plan necessarily.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that point of time, nobody was talking about stakes. It was considered science fiction, moonshot. How can we make a steak out of plants? A burger makes sense. A sausage, chicken nugget, but a steak is the most complicated food product that we eat. And there is no food technology that exists that can reach to this level of complexity. And 3D printing has a lot of disadvantages, a lot, a lot, a lot. But complexity is the number one benefit. There's no added cost for complexity.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I actually emailed both Impossible and Beyond and told them you should start working on 3D printed MIT and I want to be the guy to do it and they did an answer. But it was more on how do I get into this industry. So what is my reason to contribute something to this industry that I want to be a part of? And it was a nice story. I know printing, I know 3D printing. Maybe there is”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I quit my job from High Con with two boys, I had many options. The most immediate options was to find a new job. But there was this notion of maybe there is a revolution in plant-based meat, and maybe this is my purpose. My purpose is to take part in this revolution.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. And the challenge is that everybody is aware of the fact that beef consumption doesn't make any sense. Most of the food around the world goes to cows and not to human beings. The water, cows basically are one billion population of one billion that eats more food and consumes more water than all of the human population. And we continue to raise these animals because they make a really tasty food product. Not for nutrition. You can have nutrition by eating lentils or chicken, which is more effective. You can eat pork, which is not good for the environment. But we just enjoy so much eating beef because it's so complicated, because it's so rich, it's so special. And almost every culture around the world elevates beef more than any other food product. And it's an expensive food product. And we buy more and more of that and the prices are increasing and the environment is paying a higher burden.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And doing it with your kids and explaining why are the kids there and the mother there and what is happening to the kids and what will happen to the mothers later on, it's really sad. And my brain made this connection between what I'm eating and the living creature that I know more than the average person.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a lot of reasons why people stop eating meat. For me, it was the fact that you're eating somebody's else kid. I looked at my son. I have now three boys. And I said, I don't want to be eating somebody's child. The other element, I took my son to the dairy farm. I still like to take my kids to the dairy farm. And when I was a kid, the dairy farm was romantic. It's the place where milk comes from and you have these amazing creatures. Now it's really sad because you see the separation of calves from the mother cow and you see the pain and you see the suffering and you see the agony.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's an intersection of two elements in my life. Actually, the real decision to take the leap into the deep water was when my second son was born. When my second son was born, I just quit my job without a plan. There wasn't a plan. It wasn't that I knew we were going to start redefined meat. That is one element. The other element is that I stopped eating meat. So I was a big meat consumer. Really, you would ask me 10 years ago, what is my hobby? I will tell you meat is my hobby. Because I love cooking and I spent a lot of time. We used to have a family restaurant and I used to spend a lot of time in the kitchen cooking. And I became fascinated about finding the best meat and getting connections to the best butchers and getting notified when they slaughter three-week-year-old lamb.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but it's also more fundamental when my son was born. Immediately I started thinking differently in what I'm doing. And I said, let's go to something smaller, let's go to something that is different and not really be stuck in the corporate ladder. But I went to something that was already, I went straight into being a VP marketing of a startup that I thought is going to grow dramatically. Really, really amazing people with a big dream and the culture of 100 people. It wasn't a tiny startup, but this culture of we're doing something that will change the world.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think it's very easy because it provides you with a lot of comfort and a lot of security. And also you tell yourself the story of why this is right for me, what is the reason that I'm very good at that and not where your creativity or your dream can come into reality because that's not an option. You need to say my passion is really growing the amazing field of making printers more profitable So, you need to believe in that until you find what is really right for you, until you find this individual calling or purpose that you say, then it's not a risk. Then if I don't pursue this path, I'm risking something big, but I was the guy actually that killed for a lot of people the startup dream because I was very good at explaining why every startup will fail.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also, why would I take a risk when the career path is so amazing and so successful and it's actually quite interesting what I'm doing? I met great people all over the world. I went to conferences. I could live the life that I thought were right for me, which was so different than my life of my parents that basically do what they want to do and not what anybody or the corporate world defines for them to do.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was our belief, our belief that we are limited, that we don't have this ability to take risk. We also became fathers at the same time. But we were also very frustrated because we were 30 at that time. And I told Adam once, we have 40 more years to work. What are we going to do in these 40 years?”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we actually talked about how we are not the type of people that are going to start our own business and that we are corporate, we are really good in corporate. That one day we will both be CEOs or senior managers in big companies. This was like the vision then.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he was a product manager and he did the same revolution in the field of flexible packaging. So your Cheetos, your Doritos, everything that comes in a bag, pouches, he developed and launched and sold the first digital production printing press for pouches and flexible packaging in parallel. So we had a parallel path.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was in charge of basically helping packaging companies print packages that are made very fast and can be personalized. So they can write your name on the chocolate package, which is a very, very difficult technology, very exciting business that nobody knows exists because nobody understands all of these big industries that are behind the scene of all of our consumption.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of my closest mentors, he told me once that I should become a CEO one day. And in order to become a CEO, you need to be first a product manager because then you're a CEO of a product. So I went to HP to become a product manager of a product.”
2023-09-28 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · When your dinner is printed with Eshchar Ben-Shitrit of Redefine Meat · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT