Nick: Singapore is home to innovation, especially in emerging sectors, such as alternative proteins. However, with all things new, regulation can be tricky to navigate. How have start-ups like Shiok Meats partnered with governments across the region to both innovate and deliver value, while making sure they address the social concerns of the communities they operate in?
How do you also work within a diversity of regulations across Southeast Asia?
Rovik: Today we have with us, Sandhya Sriram, the group CEO and co-founder of Shiok Meats Private Limited Singapore, the first cell-based seafood and meat company in Southeast Asia. The first cell-based crustacean company globally, and the parent company of SEA's first cell-based red meat company, Gaia Foods. Given her wealth of experience, Sandhya is well-placed to discuss navigating the regulatory environment in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Sandhya, welcome to the show.
Sandhya: Pleasure to be here.
Nick: I feel like we should cue that song from “The Little Mermaid”, Under the Sea. Like right now, like this is just, “Everything's better, down where it’s wetter…”.
Rovik: I hope it's in the public domain. And if it isn't in the public domain, we've got to call Bob Iger and get some rights to this thing.
[2’07”] Sandhya’s Time Management Strategy
Nick: So, before we start, I've had the pleasure of meeting Sandhya a few times before. And one of the things that she does, which is so interesting, is that when you drop her an email, you instantly get a response saying - I'm doing this really cool thing with time. I will get back to you, but not necessarily today. How do you do it?
Sandhya: Honestly, I don't think you have to be bound by time - instead time should be bound by you.
Rovik: Oh my Gosh
Nick: Oh my [gosh]. These quotes. Oh my gosh.
Rovik: Sandhya is a master of time quotes.
Nick: Sandhya do you have like a motivational poster department? [Chuckles] Okay. Hold on. So how do you bound time?
Sandhya: So I think for us, especially during COVID or even before COVID, we're so bound by the emails that come to us, be it a scientist, be it an entrepreneur, be it a CEO. And then we, I think, human instinct is to respond almost immediately, but I'm like - Why should I do that?
Like, ‘For what reason?’ and ‘Why is this other person waiting for my reply?’ If I had done my job properly, this person shouldn't be waiting for my reply. If it's that urgent, they will find a way to reach me rather than an email. So I schedule emails on two days a week. I read emails every day for one hour in the morning, one hour in the afternoon or something.
Nick: So you schedule responding to emails.
Sandhya: Yes. Yes. And this year I've actually scheduled sections of time through those two days to respond to a certain sector of emails.
Nick: And when you've rearranged your life, it's almost like defragging your hard drive. You've made it more organized. Are you more productive?
Sandhya: Oh, definitely. Yes. And I don't have to bother about whether my team is waiting for me to respond or an external person is waiting for me to respond.
Because my day is so busy that I can't respond to something where I know I have to think about it. If it's a yes or a no, it's almost in the next 20 seconds. But if I have to reply to it with an answer, or I need information from some of my team members or from an external party, I need some time to get through that.
I'm not going to push that person to give me an answer because the external party is waiting for a quick reply.
[3’58”] What is Shiok Meats and Cell Cultured Meat?
Rovik: Exactly. So, I love that you are innovating even in your personal life and Shiok Meats is basically at the forefront of innovation in food tech and alternative proteins. Could you introduce Shiok Meats to our listeners, for someone who's never heard about alternative proteins?
Sandhya: So Shiok Meats is a cultivated seafood and meat company. And what I mean by cultivated is we cultivate or grow stem cells or cells to grow seafood and meats. So basically when you take a piece of seafood or meat that you eat currently, it's made up of muscle, fat, connective tissue, and blood, which is made up in turn of cells. I think everybody's heard of cells.
And then stem cells are this baby cell that gives rise to cells and then cells form tissues, and tissues form meat. That sort of what it is.
Rovik: Oh yeah.
Sandhya: You give that conducive environment. So that's pretty much what we do, but we do all of this in a large stainless steel tank, much like a brewery, but instead of beer, it's meat inside or seafood inside.
Rovik: I cannot imagine that.
Sandhya: It's literally that. We've done it. You can see it, it's there online and we have tasted it. So that's pretty much what it is. And this reduces the reasons for us to grow an animal, to set up a farm, or to go into the oceans to catch animals and slaughter as well. So we don't do any of that.
We don't grow an animal. We grow part of the animal that we eat as humans. So we grow in our case, we do crustaceans, like shrimp crab lobster. So we don't grow the whole shrimp. We grow the meat inside. We don't grow the shell. We don't grow the head. We don't grow the legs. None of it.
[5’46”] Taking an Asian perspective to alternative proteins
Rovik: That's such a fascinating idea. And I remember seeing just snippets of this in sci-fi films. But most of the sci-fi films tend to show this in the West, somewhere in the US or Europe. But Shiok Meats is in Southeast Asia and in Singapore - I'm curious, why do it here?
Sandhya: See I'm originally from Asia and I've lived in Singapore for 14 years now and I'm trained as a stem cell scientist. And that's where the idea stemmed from. And I'm a vegetarian for ethical environmental reasons and to put two and two together. And I said - this is what I want to do.
And when we started off in 2018 and what I mean by we is my co-founder and I, and I, when we started off in 2018, nobody ever knew about cultivated meat in this part of the world. Yeah. There were a few companies in the US, I think one or two in the UK or Europe.
And we said - ‘Why not bring this brilliant idea to Asia where 60% of the world's population lives? Nobody's looking at crustaceans or seafood.’
So why not just jump on that opportunity? Give ourselves about 12 months to figure it out. If we don't, we get back to our jobs because we are educated. We can get back our jobs, but why not take the risk for 12 months?
So I think it's the heart and soul of being Asian, being in Asia and looking at the Asian population. And also the sustainability issues we have with food here. I think all of that put together, we said, let's be unique and let's start.
Nick: Sandhya, I'm so glad that you raised the topic of animal cruelty and animal slaughter. And perhaps I'm just not well-read enough in the alternative protein world, but I tend to find that many of the businesses that do alt-protein from the West emphasize as their primary selling point, the environmental issues, the carbon issues, the pollution, the fishing and what not.
But I'm so glad that you add an Eastern perspective on this. And speaking as a Jain, myself, and a Hindu, for me one of the primary reasons to think about your product is in fact, the avoidance of having to kill an animal. Why is the world discussion about alt-protein, maybe so tilted towards carbon and not enough tilted in a balanced way towards animals?
Sandhya: It should be tilted towards all the possible reasons. It's not just carbon or the environment. It's not just cruelty. It's everything from ‘How are we going to feed the 10 billion population pandemic or not?’, ‘How are we going to rear so many animals for all of us, given that the demand for meat is only going up with the middle income or middle-class sort of going up in all developing countries?’
There are a couple of reasons why we do this other than animal cruelty - environmental reasons, food safety, and food security. Just think about Singapore. And this is why Singapore has a 30 by 30 mandate, right. They brought out the food story and they said - ‘Hey, by the way, we're 6 million in population. We import 90% of our food. What happens tomorrow if we can't import? What are we going to eat? What are we going to grow?’
So that's where it comes from. And we have enough countries around the world that have issues with food, safety and security. Honestly, we shouldn't be eating chickens or eggs from Brazil. We should be eating it from Malaysia or within Singapore.
Nick: And how do you localize the product? Because the beauty of what you do is you can be given a cell line from any biome on the planet. And, if you will, print it out here in Singapore, are there ways in which you want to tailor that or tweak it to be maybe more tuned to local tastes?
Sandhya: Of course. Our first prototype was a dumpling. How more Asian can it get? Our second product was lobster, but we kept it to a biscuit, a terrine. But with crab last year, we launched with a chili crab and crab cakes.
That's how Singaporean and Asian you can get but we do show our products, in Western dishes. as well. We, in fact, are even looking at the Indian subcontinent dishes to show the diversity of the way you can use this product. It's not just meant for dumplings.
Rovik: Yeah. Have you done taste tests and have people been able to figure out the different-
Sandhya: Of course, you shouldn't take my word for it because I'm a vegetarian. My description of what it tastes like is seafoody, that's my description, but yeah, and umami maybe that's what I feel, but we have done blind taste test. We have had chefs, food critiques tested, and they couldn't tell the difference most of the time.
Rovik: Wow.
Nick: Is there such a thing as being tastier than nature? Are we able to add nutritional elements or flavor elements, new combinations? I feel like to a certain extent we're painting, like in the old days before artificial colors, with whatever we could find in nature, but there are entirely new colors that the human imagination could create.
Sandhya: I'm so glad you asked that because we feel our meat is actually, for lack of a better word, too clean because we grow it in such a controlled environment. There are no environmental factors like that would cause in a shrimp.
So there is no water that is getting contaminated with air or whatever it is. The feed that we give ourselves is very clean.
Nick: Street food tastes more like street and less like food. So-
Sandhya: True.
Nick: You need to have a little bit of that kind of masala.
Sandhya: So, my food tech team says that our taste of our products are ‘refined.’ That's the word that they use.
Nick: Oh, that sounds very impressive. What does that mean?
Sandhya: So it actually means it's not ‘streetish.’ The beauty of our product is [for] every batch, you do, you get the same taste and the same flavor. So, the variations are lesser. Yeah.
[10’57”] Navigating Regulations for new innovative technologies
Rovik: That's such an interesting new world for food. And it's at one time, very exciting. And also at the same time, potentially something that a lot of people could be worried or concerned about. And I guess that's why regulations are in place.
And I'm pretty sure that when you first came up with this topic or when people were starting to talk about cell cultured meat, probably all the regulators were like - oh no, what does this mean for our current regulation?
How do we think about allowing this food into the market? And especially in Asia, because you want to be an Asian company. I can imagine it's not that easy because some of the regulators here… First of all, there's so many countries in Southeast Asia, you have to work with all the regulators.
And then more importantly, there's also this notion that regulators here may not be as familiar with food tech. So I'm curious, what have been some of the challenges that Shiok Meats has had to navigate and how have you overcome them?
Sandhya: See, honestly, for us, when we started off, like I said, there were a few companies in the U.S. and so FDA and U.S.DA was talking about this, but for them, they have an issue with lobbying, like the farmers there are lobbying against this because they feel that we're going to, that we are going to put them out of business, which I'll come back to. We are actually not, in fact, we are enabling them with a new technology. That's what we're doing. We're not going to put them out of business.
But anyways, in the outcome, when you see a new industry disrupting, of course, you're going to go against it. And so FDA and U.S.DA had to maintain a quorum per se, or a balance between these two.
But when we started in Asia, the Singapore Food Agency, at that point, like I said, wasn't really looking into these types of products. So we went to them and said, Hey, listen, in the next couple of years, we want to sell this in Singapore. What do you think?
And they were like - oh sounds interesting, let's look into it.
And they weren't even against it because they have heard of it. They have heard of it in the U.S. They've heard of cultured meat or whatever. And they were like, sure, we'll have a look at it. And we didn't push it because we're still about a year away from commercial launch. So we said, okay, let's take it slow.
We have started these conversations. We went on FSSAI in India. We contacted the regulators in Hong Kong, in Australia and we said, let's start these conversations early because we knew this will take time, but we have time because we are still an R&D company. We don't have a product yet. We're still figuring it out. So let's start working with these regulators. And one basic thing for us was we knew we had to educate the regulators.
Nick: You say you had time. No CEO has time. I think you made time, made this a priority to actually carve a bit of your time out of your day to go meet a bunch of people four years in advance.
Sandhya: For sure. And at the end of the day, you are trying to sell a product that's so novel that has so many challenges around it, including whether the consumer really wants it or not.
What are they going to question about it? Will the regulators allow it? What if in four years I've spent millions of dollars. I have a great product and nobody allows me to sell it. What's the point of having a company then I'm spending all this time, money and effort. So we said - let's figure it out if they say no, let's go educate them to make it a yes.
I would say we definitely played a part with SFA and Singapore being that first country to ever approve a cultivated meat product in the world. And currently the only country as well, which was surprising to us because we thought Singapore would wait for the U.S. and follow through and let's see. But they astonished us by being that first country. And we said, amazing. This is amazing.
Nick: I want to pull on that string for a second because, in general, the business community often gets stuck in its own verbiage of “Oh, regulation, so complicated”. That's a superficial answer.
A more sophisticated way to think about it, or maybe a better question to ask you would be to say, is it the case that there's two buckets of regulators, maybe in different countries - regulators who spend a lot of time looking over the shoulders of other regulators saying, ‘Hey, has somebody else approved this, and is there a best practice?’ And then a very interesting set of regulators that say ‘On its own merits on first principles, this is interesting.’
Sandhya: So Singapore was the first bucket, so they said we'll just wait for the US and then we'll see what happens, but the US didn't move.
So then they had two reasons why Singapore pushed this; one was food safety and security which ties into your 30 by 30 mandate. Second is we don't really have lobbying here. We don't have internal agriculture for anybody to come against what you're innovating.
And the other set of countries that's really intrigued by this and we'll get regulatory regulations in place soon is the Middle East, because they don't have anything literally. They import everything as well. So they are pumping in millions of dollars into this hoping that all these companies would do something for the Middle East.
Rovik: Yeah. I guess they're basically turning quote-unquote threats into opportunities with the stuff that's there. Okay. I want to take one step further, right?
[15’25”] Engaging with Southeast Asia’s traditional industries
So you've gotten success in Singapore regulatory partnership, but at the end of the day, you guys are a company and you need to achieve growth. And I assume that a lot of that growth has to come from Asia, where there are a lot more regulators and probably more seafood lobbyists. So how have you been thinking about navigating regulation around the region and you have alluded to how Singapore's credibility has helped, maybe you can take us a bit down that journey as well.
Sandhya: For sure. Everything from Indonesia to Thailand, to India, it's not that I've not received threats from the seafood industry for doing what I'm doing. I've had enough comments thrown at me saying you are trying to kill our industry and so on. So one of the things I make sure I tell them is - listen, I'm not, you know what, I'm too small to kill you at this point. Instead, why don't you work with me?
Nick: I like the fact you emphasized "at this point”.
Sandhya: If you keep pushing me, I might.
Nick: [Laughing] I won't forget the fact that you tried to threaten me.
Sandhya: No, the idea is to educate them. See they're scared. Okay. It's fine. They can be scared. Because they know that their industries are also going through a lot of questioning. They are undergoing demand and supply issues.
They are having issues. They know that their industry might have an issue in the next couple of decades. I'm not talking about years. So the idea is why don't we enable these people with a technology like ours. I'm a technology company. I'm not a seafood manufacturer.
They know how to sell seafood. They know how to make it. They know what's the best quality and they have the distributors and the consumers.
Nick: Seafood just happens to be the first instantiation of what you do.
Sandhya: Right!
Nick: But it won’t end with that.
Sandhya: Be it meats, be it seafood, whatever it is. Yes, we have acquired Gaia Foods that does red meat as well.
The concept is, let's bring up a technology that's so licensable, so usable by an end consumer who doesn't need to know cells and biology in such a way that tomorrow, if a seafood manufacturer comes to me and is like - hey, I want to use your technology.
I'm like - here's A, B, C, D E. This is what we'll supply you. This is the process. This is how automated it is. Sure. Let's do it.
Nick: So you fancy yourself TSMC for meat. If someone has effectively a blueprint, you can put that into production and volume.
Sandhya: For sure. And the idea is to also have a meat cultivator in your house, on your kitchen top.
Nick: Isn't that amazing? So you'd literally come home or you as you're driving home an app the cooking in advance.
Sandhya: The making and the cooking.
Nick: The making and the cooking, the brewing. Literally.
Let's go back for a second to regulation though. And you hit upon a super important point. The other great, I think maybe, myth about regulations is that it happens in a vacuum. There's just somebody that wakes up one morning or takes a shower and says, oh, we should regulate. But we all know that actually 90% of regulation is precipitated by, prompted by, incumbents, in an industry who like a certain way of things being done.
So I'm really curious, in your journey to co-opt and to have harmonious relationships with the powers that be, what's the best way to do that, Sandhya? Is it through the regulatory engagement? Is it through licensing your technology to them? Have you even considered bringing some of those incumbents into the cap table of your business to give them a chance to double0dip on your success?
Sandhya: All of the above. It has to be all together.
We have seafood producers on our cap table. We have the largest meat company, Tyson foods on our cap table. So we already have these people double dipping if you want to use that word, but you know what? I think they're being strategic. So it's good.
We have seafood producers on our cap table. We have the largest meat company, Tyson foods on our cap table. So we already have these people double dipping if you want to use that word, but you know what? I think they're being strategic. So it's good.
Sandhya: Exactly. Which is fine. Let's prove ourselves. And that I will become two eyes and they know what to do after that.
Rovik: And how is that helping with the regulatory aspect.
Sandhya: I think it all ties in, it's all about optics at the end of the day it's technology and it's how much you progress and how much the consumers wanted.
So Singapore wouldn't have done it just like that. They have looked at all of it and now every other is looking at it. So we were speaking to Japan, we were seeing the U S really wanting to move forward. We're seeing India wanting to move forward. In fact, Australia, New Zealand said they have an MOU with the SFA here.
So it's like that harmonised regulatory landscape that we're looking for. It's not yet on paper, but I'm sure it's happening. China, as of this week, just announced cultivated meat in their five-year plan for agriculture, because China is very quiet and we were all like, okay, what's happening and then they just announced it. And we said - okay, now it's a done deal. If China says, yes, it's a done deal and it's happening.
[19’40”] Mindset to partner with regulators
Rovik: Okay. One other thing that I'm thinking about now is Shiok Meats is also, probably not at the end of its innovation cycle. You guys are probably still so much more innovation to go in with that innovation probably comes more regulatory challenges.
Based on the experience you've had, what do you think needs to evolve in the regulatory environment? Both in Singapore, as well as in Southeast Asia, for us to be able to reap more benefits from the innovation that's happening in alternative proteins.
Sandhya: We're in the beginning of innovation. We're not even in the middle of it. We're still 18 months away from the first product.
And then we have another long journey ahead of us. Be it Singapore or be it any other country and like you said, Asia is so fragmented that we have to go country by country literally. And it is hard. But we are, we knew it from day 1 and we were prepared for it and I have a team that's prepared for it. And that's how you attack it.
Literally, for lack of a better word attack. That's what you do. I think how it comes together is also having regulators who are willing to support and speak to other regulators. The MOU between SFA and New Zealand, Australia just didn't happen. They knew that they have to go beyond Singapore.
They knew that they have to talk to other regulators to make things happen. So it happens from the regulators. It happens from the demand from consumers. It happens from the media talking in the right light about this industry. It happens from the millions of dollars that's going into this industry.
And then it happens from companies like us that are saying - hey, we have a technology and a product, and we know it'll work. Please allow us to sell.
It has to be all these five coming together to make that happen. You will see the changes only very slowly in very incremental values, but you will see it.
Rovik: If let's say you were to give advice to any other company, right? They are looking at Singapore and South-East Asia and they're looking at the fragmental regulation, what would be maybe the two or three tips you'd give them to begin thinking about navigating, working with regulators and, just having almost like an efficient plan to tackle all the regulators.
Sandhya: I would speak for SFA where they say literally please drop us an email and we'll get back to you and let's start the conversation. That's pretty much what it is.
Nick: For those listeners who don't know what SFA is.
Sandhya: Singapore Food Agency, which is the regulator of Singapore.
They are open to talking, they're open to listening, and they're open to answering. That's what you need and in which country can you say that I can speak directly to the regulator? Like I can have a face-to-face meeting with them. Be it the chairman, be it the working group, whoever it is in the regulator, you can actually do that. So I would say to any other company that's looking at Singapore, please speak to them, just reach out and speak to them.
Nick: But this goes back to this sort of small nation, big nation dynamic. In a small nation, you're able to have that intimacy and camaraderie and sort of candidness. But the small nation must also have great credibility for it to be a springboard-ble thing.
So Singapore has actually added a lot of value to you because you've been able to have those conversations, but then a lot of people pay very close attention to what Singapore might be doing.
Sandhya: Exactly. And for answering about the big countries, how we do it is we either go through non-profits or other companies, other organizations that are also advocating alternative proteins. So we form a group, and then that's how we reach for FSSAI. We did that via Good Food Institute, India. And right now, Shiok Meats actually steered the formation of an APAC Society for cellular agriculture.
Eleven companies around Asia have come together to become members of the society. We're registered in Singapore, officially launching very soon. So yeah.
Nick: Well, there's an old rule of thumb and industry isn't an industry until it has a trade association. And then eventually a trade magazine and a certification.
Nick: We have to thank you, Sandhya. What you're doing is it's groundbreaking. There is such an amount of nutritional benefit you will bring the world from us, from a safety and security benefit, in these, god forbidden, times of war and provocation, but also back to my own personal ethical beliefs and faith beliefs. I think you're doing so much to minimize animal cruelty around the world, which is just incredibly impressive. So hats off.
Rovik: Yeah.
Sandhya: Thank you very much.
Rovik: And thank you for coming on our show.
Sandhya: Of course. Pleasure to be here.
Nick: Take care Sandhya, great to have you.
Rovik: Thanks again for tuning into growth islands for more great content and resources on expanding your team in Southeast Asia, check out a growth islands micro-site and the podcast description link.
We'll see you in the next episode.
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