Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food by Chase Purdy

Author:Chase Purdy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Portfolio
Published: 2020-06-15T23:00:00+00:00

10

THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

A short man with curly hair steps forward and interrupts my conversation with Tetrick, leaning down and speaking softly into his ear.

“I know you don’t, but it’s at ten a.m.,” I hear him say.

“Are we seeing their slaughterhouse?” Tetrick asks.

The buzz of the JUST office is at its usual steady hum. I lean forward a little, straining to hear them better.

“They can take us to a slaughterhouse.”

“I want to see one,” Tetrick replies, staring at the man with an intensity that surprises me.

“We can ask them.”

“He said I could before.”

“I’ll text them,” the man says. “I mean, I don’t want to disrupt it, but I’ll send him a message.”

“Okay,” Tetrick says with a nod, swiveling around to meet my quizzical expression. Seeing my confusion, he fills in the blanks.

Hernan Jaramillo is charged with business development at JUST. But any title JUST might give him would be a buttoned-up way of saying the man has a very cool job. On any given day, Jaramillo is very likely on another continent, chatting with business executives—often over rounds of stiff drinks—about the opportunities to be had by partnering with his start-up. As JUST has pushed vigorously into the cell-cultured meat space, his job has largely revolved around connecting with meat companies about its work.

For weeks Jaramillo has been trying to broker a meeting between Tetrick and executives at JBS in Brazil. JBS is the world’s largest processor of fresh beef and pork, and it does north of $50 billion each year in sales. If such a meeting was to happen, it would be a very, very big deal, and open the door to a major partnership.

Tetrick is looking for more than just a financial investment. He wants JBS to use his technology.

And this is one area where I think JUST stands out against some of the other start-ups in the cell-cultured meat field, save for Future Meat Technologies. By playing with a business-to-business model, a company can potentially scale the reach of its product dramatically, though there are often some concessions over control.

It’s one thing for a company such as Tyson Foods or Cargill to invest money in a start-up; it’s another thing entirely for them to redirect that investment back to themselves, agreeing to rejigger their own internal processes to make cell-cultured meat on their own. And that’s the sweet spot that Tetrick is going for.

“You can have a bunch of little investments—two million or three million dollars for these guys is nothing,” he says. “But what about investing in infrastructure?”

He paused to clear his throat.

“I want them to fucking buy bioreactors, you know?”

And this is the start of Tetrick’s newest dream for his company. He’s not out seeking investment dollars anymore. He’s looking to forge deals with existing companies. Big companies. Companies that either have financial heft or a certain cachet. He wants executives at JBS and Cargill and Tyson to go back to their conference rooms and talk about building a thirty-thousand-square-foot facility outside Rio de

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