Clean Meat by Paul Shapiro

Author:Paul Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2018-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

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Producing a meatball and revealing the first news of the tasting to the Wall Street Journal was one thing. It’s another beast entirely to go from prototype to grocery store shelves. Memphis Meats now had to secure additional funding to even start thinking about turning its publicity stunt into a marketing reality. Though the company had aimed to raise $2 million, Valeti notes, “We surpassed even our own expectations.” With meatballs now in hand, they quickly raised more than $3 million—from investors like SOSV, Jeremy Coller, and New Crop Capital, a $25 million venture capital fund run by GFI’s Friedrich and his board chair Nick Cooney.

New Crop’s investment of $500,000 into the infant company was particularly noteworthy, as one of the fund’s biggest investments to date. “We see Memphis Meats as the future of meat,” Friedrich tells me. “By getting in on the ground floor, investors are positioning themselves for a big return, and they’re also enabling a potential solution to two of the world’s most pressing problems: feeding almost ten billion people by 2050 and helping the nations of the world meet their climate change obligations under the Paris Agreement.”

Perhaps even more interesting was the fact that Jeremy Coller, the hugely influential British finance executive, was putting his own wealth into the company. With his early investment in Memphis Meats, Coller sent a signal heard by many in the investment world. “When Coller speaks, investors listen,” says Chuck Laue, the cofounder and vice chairman of Asurion, one of the biggest insurance operations on the planet. “The fact that Coller is so concerned about factory farming and its effects on the planet, and that he’s so bullish about these cultured-animal product companies, attracts a lot of other investors to the space.”

Laue and his wife, Jennifer, have their own venture fund, Stray Dog Capital, and additionally became early investors in Memphis Meats. (He also serves on the Humane Society of the United States’ board of directors, and she on HSUS’s National Council.) In fact, Stray Dog Capital only invests in start-ups it sees as advancing animals’ interests, with the bulk of its millions of dollars of investments being in food companies—both plant-based and cellular ag—seeking to compete with animal agriculture.

For several years, Coller—whose private equity firm has assets under management of $17 billion—has railed against the environmental harm done by the animal-agriculture sector. After investing in Hampton Creek following a 2014 meeting with Josh Balk, Coller began meeting more and more influentials in both the plant-based and cultured-meat worlds, and continued to back those he found most promising.

“You need solutions if you’re going to end animal factory farming,” the private equity titan proclaims. “These companies are those solutions, and many of them are likely to do very well.”

Ironically the son of a leather coat-maker, Coller, a vegetarian, now spends considerable resources to raise awareness about the unsustainable nature of animal agribusiness. A friend even wrote two obituaries for him: one in which he died at fifty-four and another at ninety-eight.

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