HIBT Lab! New Culture: Matt Gibson and Inja Radman

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So industrialized animal farming can be incredibly environmentally destructive. According to the UN. The meat and dairy industries produce 14.5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. You've heard us talk about this before on the show. That is as much as all cars, commercial trucks, planes, and ships combined. And believe it or not, when it comes to specific foods, industrialized mass produced cheese. is one of the worst offenders, which I know it's hard to hear because uh we love cheese. Well this is a problem. The two entrepreneurs, Matt Gibson and Inya Rodman, decided to take on. But there was just one problem.

They felt like most plant-based vegan cheeses just didn't cut it, they don't melt in the same way, and they wanted to see if they could make something with a bit more cheesy deliciousness. But how do you make cheese with all of that cheesy goodness? without a cow? Well to answer that question, Matt and Inya founded their company, New Culture. They're now manufacturing a dairy protein called casein. It's what gives cheese many of its cheesy qualities like the ability to stretch and melt and become gooey. And they're making casein without any animals. Right now, New Culture is working on its first product, it's a mozzarella cheese that plans to roll out to pizzeria's in 2024. Matt and Inya actually met over the internet. They grew up on opposite sides of the world, Inya in Croatia and Matt in New Zealand.

Where he was never far from the dairy industry. And in 2013, after working for a tech startup, Matt was inspired to take his career in a new direction, pursuing this new field of meat alternatives. But all he needed was a co-founder. For any startup. to be successful, you need a really strong co-founder.

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