Giuseppe Scionti  0:00  

Hello, hello! My name is Giuseppe Scionti and I am CEO and founder at Novameat. We are a Barcelona based startup and we work in alternative protein. So we work on the next generation of plant based meat alternatives. This is a frog, because I want to start with a metaphor. This animal, when you put it in cold water, and then you move from cold water to boiling water, the animal will jump out of the boiling water because you will understand it you will die. Like in this image, right, if you move from cold to very hot, the animal will jump away. But the animal when it starts from cold water and moves] gradually to boiling water, the animal will not understand that it's going to die and it will not jump out of the boiling water. This is a metaphor, of course, of what's happening to humans with the global temperature change. We are not very good at understanding what is the danger ahead of us. So we work on alternative protein because we think it's the most straightforward way, together with the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, to avoid a collapse of biodiversity and climate change. We talk a lot about climate change, we forget about things that are irreversible, because we can go up and down with temperature, but what we need to be very, very careful of is biodiversity loss as well. For example, if you lose the Amazon rainforest, if we lose the Borneo, this is not getting back, you need millions of years to recover that. While temperature, maybe in decades, we are able to stop and start decreasing it a little bit, but it's a very, very serious matter. So it's not just about the Arctic poles and the Antarctic, which are protecting us from the accelerating climate change. But also it's about, as I said, biodiversity loss, especially because the main driver of deforestation is the intensive livestock industry because you need the animals to pasture but also you need the soy field for the feed for the animals. So not the soy that we use for ourselves, but the soy that is food for the chicken, the pigs and all the other crops for the animals. Alright, so we are talking about annual CO2 emissions from deforestation by product: number one is beef. Number two is it doesn't matter! You say this is numbers from Our World in Data and as you can see this graph is incredible, right? All this combined make maybe 10% of what is the damage from beef. And when you talk about the main drivers of tropical deforestation. Number one is beef. Number two is palm oil. Okay, so we're talking about the Amazon rainforest and we're talking about the Borneo. And this is going on at all the frontiers of deforestation that are going on right now. My message is clear. We need to stop deforestation now. You can talk about the COP26 or the COP27, but if you don't stop deforestation it doesn't make sense, right? It's easy. stop deforestation. You want to eat meat, you want to eat alternative protein? Nobody likes deforestation anyways. Okay. All right. So now another animal which is a incredible animal. 

Giuseppe Scionti  3:39  

It's an axolotl.  An axolotl is an animal living in Mexico, which is an extreme risk of extinction and it's able to regenerate the parts of his body, even if you cut everything apart from the head, and even the part of the main organs are able to regenerate more than salamander more than a zebrafish. And I put this image because I started this adventure doing bioprinting of human organs. I was working in bioengineering. I was professor in tissue engineering. And I've been working for 10 years on regenerating cartilage, muscle, bone, cornea, oral mucosa, and other tissues and organs. I've been working in Italy, then in Sweden, in Spain, in London, in Mexico and in Chile, and then in the Polytechnic University of Catalonia here in Spain before we opened the startup. And John here joined me at the beginning just when I had an idea and I was able to get the texture of something similar to a tissue. And so we discussed and we said, why don't we do a piece of meat instead of just working on organs.

Giuseppe Scionti  4:44  

So we started with very, very small prototypes, very basic prototypes. Me and John at the beginning then we had now we have a much bigger team, and we are raising a funding round in the next few weeks. So now it's looking much better. And we did what is called the most realistic plant based steak in the world, according to The Guardian and many other news outlets.  We did this internal test of the microstructure of the muscle. You seem like you can get the marbling of the fat, the juiciness, but what matters is that you want to replicate the muscularity of the animal, okay. So you get the microfilaments, and you cannot see from the side here, but the plant based proteins are ordered in the same direction in our process, which is called microextrusion. And we do so that imitates the actin, the miozine, the muscular fibers, and we think we are the startup that is doing the most advanced plant based whole cuts in the world. Then we started with the beef. Beef, as you see in the data, it's terrible. And then we moved on to the pork. This is a skewer, but we also do pork sirloin, so the whole cuts, the fibrous cuts. The problem is everybody was doing burgers. Everybody was making meatballs, minced meat, chicken strips, and tuna chunks. And we said why nobody's doing the difficult things the whole cuts because 80% of meat purchases in the US are  whole cuts. So 80% of what you buy in retail, according to the USDA, is chicken breast, beef steaks, other beef cuts and pork cuts. So we did what is the first pork whole cut plant base in the world during the pandemic. And the pulled pork, as you can see, is very realistic. We did in January 2021 the largest cell based meat analog in the world because these are what are called the stem cells adipocytes. So adipocytes are stem cells because we get the plant, the texture, the nutritional properties, and we get the fat from the animals in some prototypes so that we really get the taste of that. So we did the most realistic beef, the most realistic pork whole cuts, the largest cell based whole cut, as you can see here, and then to finish we just want to send a final message. 

Giuseppe Scionti  7:20

We cannot see the changes in temperature and we have this problem of understanding what's going on overtime. We don't have this ability in our mind. But my dream is and our team’s dream is to be able to use the natural resources of our planet in a more clever way. Clever means everybody's on the same planet and we have a limited amount of resources, but we use 77% of agricultural land for livestock. Again 80% of agricultural land with all North America, Central America, and South America combined, check it on internet we use all of this for livestock, food feed for the animals or space for the animals This is stupid. Alright, so we go away but before we go away, here we are doing live. We are printing a piece of meat, we are cooking a piece of pork, sorry a piece of beef and a piece of chicken whole cut. What I want to leave you with is a message. These are the animals in the planet that have less than 1000 numbers of animals living for each one of these species. These are at risk of extreme extinction. They have less than 1000, and this is the list. 

Giuseppe Scionti  9:38  

You see, this is a piece of chicken and beef. You see there is a filament here. The structure of these have different aromas, different ingredients. While she tries the base formula is water, 60% more or less, yellow pea protein, which is a type of protein that Beyond Meat uses but we have been able to do it also with fava bean chickpea. We've been able to do it with hemp, with rice, with the protein extract from cells and also normally sunflower oil because in Europe we use that as a base. But you can also use coconut oil or canola oil or olive oil. 

Giuseppe Scionti  10:52

And to finish I think that the other ingredients can be in the future other ingredients that are interesting for us in the future like algae, right? Or, for example, natural color and natural aromas. So that's it! Thank you very much for participating! And come here to join us if you want to try and take some pictures later. We move this on the side so we don't disturb the stage. Thank you very much!