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Jeff “Trip” Trippian spent most of his 38-year career in agriculture before transitioning into dairy and then meat.
Over time, Tripician found himself working in “more and more of the specialty meat category,” he told Food Dive.
After working as a marketing assistant at Proctor & Gamble and moving up through various roles at Sara Lee and Borden Dairy, eventually becoming chief marketing officer at Frontier Natural Products and president of Perdue Farms, Tripician saw a point of conflict between food processors and producers.
“I started to become more aware of what a partnership should be, because the processors and the manufacturers are interdependent on each other, and I thought, why don’t we take better care of each other?”
As the new CEO of cultured meat company Meatable, Tripician hopes to apply the same philosophy to the controversial category.
Selected captions
Licensed by Meatable.
“Meatable called and said, 'This is an idea,' and I said, 'I've heard a lot of ideas.' Anyway, thank you,” Tripician said.
But the Meatable team persisted, asking Tripician what the future of food might look like.
“They started talking about climate change, land degradation, climate issues, food insecurity, and I said, ‘Okay, that’s a big problem.’”
The executive began researching the cultured meat industry, but admitted he knew nothing about it.
When Tripishian flew to the Netherlands to meet with Meterble, he said the company had to prove that he was more than just an idea for the role.
“I saw that there were 68 people in research and development who figured out how to make a pound of meat in four days. It would take eight months for a pig, 20 months for a cow,” he said.
Tripician came to see the company not as a mere concept, but as a vision to support. “When I took on the role, I said, we have to innovate, we have to pioneer, but we have to do it in a way that doesn’t threaten the meat industry or one farmer or one rancher.”
The former meat industry veteran will become CEO of the Dutch startup on June 17, 2024, succeeding co-founder Krin de Nord, who will remain on the board.
Very different but interdependent
Tripician’s ethos of protecting the meat industry may seem at odds with his new role. But that’s also what makes his appointment one of the most exciting developments in the industry over the past year.
This month Discussion between two industries Upside Foods is being sued by the Institute for Justice, alleging that the company violated Florida's laws banning the sale and distribution of cultivated meat products.
After signing the bill on July 2, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he's saving the beef industry. “Global Elite”.
But according to Tripician, these two categories have the potential to work together.
His plan is to license Meatable's manufacturing capabilities. To the meat company.
“The meat industry is 90 percent made up of four or five giant corporations. So I would say to them, I have the intellectual property and the patents to be able to produce this amount of cultured meat in four days, and we will provide them with the technology, the equipment, all the suppliers, from the culture media to the ingredients,” Tripician said.
The executive described it as a model similar to how beef companies can label their products in grocery stores as “Certified Angus Beef.” When Ohio-based Angus Beef allows companies to use its seal, cattle farmers receive a premium, and consumers, meat companies and retailers also benefit because it promotes the quality of beef products.
“The vision is that when a company is doing their CapEx planning, when they decide to build a new plant or expand into a plant, they also have the option to use cultured meat to produce more of their product. And they can say, ‘Hey, we can do that with cultured meat and the Meatable guys can show us how to do that,’” Tripician said.
Tripician plans to test the scheme in Singapore, where it will be easier to access a test market, learn from the results and apply those learnings to the strategy, he said. Meatable is currently working with the chief marketing officer of a Singapore-based co-packer and is in talks with large and small meat companies in Asia, he said.
In addition to appointing an agriculture veteran as CEO, the company has invested in a former Tyson Foods executive and elected Dean Banks to its board of directors.
bank, Former President and CEO of a large meat company “He said in a statementMeatable has tremendous potential to revolutionize the cultured meat industry with its unique approach to product development and commercialization.”
A different kind of leadership
Unlike other CEOs in the cultured meat industry, Tripician doesn't have a scientific background, which he believes gives him a different and more beneficial perspective.
“I think the only way this can all be successful is if cultured meat approaches the meat industry in a way that acknowledges the challenges they pose and shows that there are solutions that can solve them, as long as they are cost-competitive and scalable.”
