Elizabeth Flood for FoodDive, August 19 2024

Jeff “Trip” Tripician spent the majority of his 38 year career in the agriculture industry before pivoting to dairy and then to meat.

As the years went on, Tripician found himself in roles that involved working with “increasingly specialty meat categories,” he said in an interview with Food Dive.

After working as a marketing assistant at Proctor & Gamble and moving up the ranks through various roles at Sara Lee and Borden Dairy, he eventually became chief marketing officer at Frontier Natural Products and President of Perdue Farms. That was when Tripician noticed points of contention between food processors and producers.

“I started to become more aware of what should have been a partnership type relationship, because both processors and producers are mutually dependent on one another, and I thought to myself, why aren’t we looking out for each other more?”

As the newly appointed CEO of cultivated meat company Meatable, Tripician is looking to bring that same philosophy to the controversial category.

“When Meatable called me they said we’re an idea, I said I hear plenty of ideas, thank you anyway,” said Tripician.

The Meatable team persisted, however, and questioned Tripician on what was going to happen with the future of food.

“They started to talk about climate change, soil degrading climate matter, food insecurity, etc. etc and I said ‘yes I get it, it’s a big problem.”

The executive then started researching the cultivated meat industry, which he admitted he knew nothing about.

When Tripician flew out to the Netherlands to meet with Meatable, he said the company had to prove it was more than an idea for him to take on the role.

“I saw there were 68 people in research & development who had figured out how to make a pound of meat in four days, that would take me eight months with a pig and 20 months with a cattle,” he said.

Tripician came to see the company as not just a concept, but a vision that he could support. “When I came into the role, I said we have to innovate, we have to be pioneers, but we have to do that in a way that does not threaten the meat industry or as much as one farmer or one rancher.”

The former meat industry veteran became the CEO of the Dutch startup on June 17, 2024, succeeding co-founder Krijn de Nood, who will remain on the Board of Directors.

Vastly different but mutually dependent

Tripician’s sentiment to protect the meat industry may seem incongruent with his new role. But it’s also what makes his appointment one of the most intriguing developments in the industry in the last year.

This month, the debate between the two industries was taken to court when Upside Foods partnered with the Institute for Justice to sue Florida for its law banning the sale and distribution of cultivated meat products.

After signing the bill on July 2, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he is saving the beef industry from the “global elite”.

But according to Tripician, the categories have the potential to work together.

His plan is to license Meatable’s manufacturing capabilities to meat companies.

“The meat industry is 90% made up of four or five big players, so I want to say to them, look, I have intellectual property and patents that say I can produce this amount of cultivated meat in 4 days, and we will give them that technology, we’ll give them all the vendors — from equipment to media ingredients,” said Tripician.

The executive described it as a model similar to how beef companies are able to put a “Certified Angus Beef” label on products in grocery stores. When Ohio-based Angus Beef gets companies to use their seal, cattle ranchers get a premium and consumers, meat companies and retailers also win because it raises the quality of a beef product.

“The vision is that when companies are coming up with their CapEx plan, when they decide they want to build a new plant or put an addition on a plant, they also have the option of using cultivated meat to produce more product. And they could say ‘hey, we could do that with cultivated meat and have the Meatable people show us how to do that,” said Tripician.

Tripician intends to experiment with this plan in Singapore, where it will be easier to access a test market, learn from the results and then apply those learnings to strategy, he said. Right now, Meatable is working with the chief marketing officer of a co-packer in Singapore, and is in talks with some meat companies in Asia, both big and small, he said.

In addition to the agriculture industry veteran’s appointment to CEO, the company also took a bet on a former Tyson Foods executive and elected Dean Banks to its board of directors.

Banks, the former president and CEO of the big meat company said in a statement “Meatable has enormous potential to disrupt the cultivated meat space with its unique approach to product development and commercialization.”

A different kind of leadership

Unlike other CEOs in the cultivated meat space, Tripician doesn’t come from a scientific background, which he believes provides him with a bit of a different and beneficial perspective.

“The only way, in my opinion, this whole thing works is if cultivated meat can approach the meat industry in a way that acknowledges its challenges, and shows them that we have solutions to help solve them, as long as it’s cost competitive and scalable.”

https://www.fooddive.com/news/how-former-agriculture-industry-exec-found-himself-ceo-cultivated-meat-meatable/724565/