Today I’m interviewing Chef Jeff Yew, Product Development Lead at GOOD Meat Asia in Singapore and this guy plays with cultivated meat every single day. He works for the only country that has actually commercialized cultivated chicken commercially, GOOD Meat. In America, you might be familiar with JUST. The company that makes a very popular plant-based egg. It’s the same company.
Throughout this interview, Chef Jeff shows time and time again how for lack of a better term, ballsy, he is in making big changes to his career. From jumping on a plane to interview for a New York restaurant, to moving to Indonesia to build his own, to trying half a cultivated chicken nugget and totally pivoting his whole career to bring this technology to market, Jeff is an inspiring innovator who really follows his heart.
So besides that, this episode gives me the opportunity to talk to someone who’s actually worked with, as in, has felt, understood it, and optimized, cultivated chicken so I asked him all sorts of questions.
You’ll have brief insight on the commercialization process on cultivated chicken, and Jeff’s viewpoint on how to make dishes with the stuff. He also goes into the activation events that GOOD Meat does all around Singapore and also some secrets on how to get this hot commodity that sells out in seconds.
What’s up with Adam
I’m recording this episode before I leave to the United States. Most likely because I think I’ll be dead tired when this episode actually launches.
My last week in Taiwan was kind of quick because I’m actually doing work. One complaint? Taiwan has the most annoying garbage truck sound in the world. It sounds like a cheap ice cream truck melody and I hear it every single day!
I’m kind of treating the last leg like a remote work trip, I’m waking up late to go to a nice Starbucks and busting out work. It feels kind of good actually. I dunno, it makes me feel really productive.
I really don’t have any regrets ending this journey now. It feels just right. I learned a lot about the world.
They say that years can last seconds and seconds can last years depending on the experiences you commit. I just feel like time has slowed down when I’ve been traveling. It’s a wonderful feeling.
Before this interview starts, let’s understand the state of play for Cell-based meat.
In 2013, Mark Post introduced the $325,000 dollar cell-based burger made completely out of animal cells. People described the taste as “a mass of protein”. This sparked a movement that eventually grew into a multi-million dollar race to develop a brand new food category that could potentially feed billions of people without the ethical and environmental destruction the current meat industry is causing.
At the end of 2021, JUST, or GOOD meat was the first company to get regulatory approval for selling cultivated meat. According to my friends in Singapore, this was essentially a 2-year process which to be honest is considered super fast. Not only did this put GOOD Meat as a historic player in the technology, but it put Singapore on the map as the place to potentially sell all sorts of cultivated meat. GOOD meat has had an extremely successful launch as they are able to control expectations extremely well from both the supply side and a product quality side.
Recently, like, I’d say August 2022, plenty of other companies such as Shiok, Vow, Umami Meats are sharing their innovations through private dinners in Singapore. As long as Singapore has its doors open, anyone who’s everyone will be able to taste cultivated meat making it a hotbed testing ground for every cultivated company on the planet.
What does that mean? It seems the technology is converging together and is accelerating but there are tons of people who still don’t understand what exactly is happening.
Most likely, supply for this stuff won’t happen for a long time, but I do think Singapore will be this fun testing ground for this type of product and you’re going to see a lot more cool innovations in the coming years. Nonetheless, it’s exciting to see the technology start to proliferate.
After constant hounding I actually was able to try GOOD Meat’s cultured chicken in Singapore. I had to do a lot of begging to my good friend Andrew Noyes, who gave me the hookup, along with the opportunity to talk with Jeff. So a courier sent me a nice little bag and I gotta say, loved the package, love the presentation, and love the product. Definitely tastes like chicken.
I hope you enjoy this episode with Jeffery Yew
We do this interview in my apartment in Singapore.
Links
Kaoshiung Garbage Truck Song (actually in the episode)
Novena
Cultivated Meat
Hawker
Chicken Rice National Food of Singapore
Iron Chef Japan
Chef Daniel Humm
Bear
Yakitori Indonesia Restaurant
1880 Member’s Club (Restaurant)
Satay
December 19th – approval for Good Meat
GOOD Meat Immersive Dining
GOOD Meat Singapore Factory
Josh Tetrick
Malaysia Chicken Supply Stops in Singapore
Inflationary Reduction Act
Michelin Best Chicken Rice
Bak Ku Tet
East Coast Lagoon
Newton’s Food Center
Instagram – @JeffYewJR
Cultured Meat sells out in 5 minutes
You have to find it on Foodpanda
Madam Fan GOOD Meat
Thank you for listening to the My Food Job Rocks podcast, you can find this episode and more at myfoodjobrocks.com/260Jeff
Jeff should get more opportunities to speak more. Wow, he’s a super passionate guy. So honored to be his first podcast interview. Something that Jeff mentioned to me is about getting into the mindset that anything is possible.
As scientists, our job is to find the limits of what’s possible and see how we can work within those limits and with years of schooling, it can take a while to deprogram yourself about this. I’m not saying all of science is made to put limits and stop progress, but we can use science to propel these limits.
I always think about science fiction whenever I ponder if anything is possible. When you think about it, the whole cultivated meat industry is considered a blip in science fiction. What used to be fiction is slowly becoming reality.
What’s beautiful about scientific progress is that we do have the ability to push forward. In general, all advancements in human life have been done because of the interconnected woveness that is the science community. People who devote their lives to pushing something unimaginable, imaginable, a community that double checks if what you’re doing makes sense, and a feedback loop that allows people to replicate and improve existing methods. When we think about it, it’s truly a beautiful thing.