How do you feed a growing planet with limited resources? The answer is innovation.

For the last 80 years, Israel has been innovating on how using a limited amount of resources to produce as much as you can and being efficient and being scrappy with what you have. I mean, that is Israel. Israel, a hub for alternative protein.

Welcome to the Israeli Trailblazers podcast, where bold thinkers create big ideas and contribute to a better world. I'm your host, Jennifer Weisman. After years of living in Israel, I'm back in America, and I see it clearly. Israel is one of the most misunderstood countries in the world. It's a powerhouse of innovation and grit and world-changing ideas, and yet most people have no clue how much Israelis contribute to the globe. Today's episode is all about Israeli food technology. No land, no water, no problem. Israel's advanced food tech is turning cow cells into steak, wastewater into farmland, and they are reimagining the future of how we feed the world. Joining me is Noga Golan, the founder of Food Impact Partners to break down cultivated meat, alternative proteins, and how this tiny country of Israel might just help to solve one of humanity's biggest problems, food insecurity. Let's dig in. As founder of Food Impact Partners, why do you feel that Israeli food tech culture is so impressive?

We work with food and ag innovation companies all over the world, in the Europe and the US, obviously in Israel. We have a subsidiary called Food Impact Israel. Israel is an innovative country, startup nation, has the entrepreneurial spirit. But I think what not many people know is Israel is actually quite small. It's the size of Delaware. About two-thirds of the country is desert. There's not much water. So there's just really not that much resources for a pretty big population. So for the last eight years, basically, Israel has been innovating on how it feeds its population. Israel invented drip irrigation. It reuses almost 90% of its wastewater for agriculture, which is the most of any country in the world. It didn't invent desalination, but it contributed to major developments in desalination, essentially solving the water crisis in Israel, converting saltwater to freshwater, has a lot of developments in precision agriculture. It's a major hub for alternative protein companies. Why is Israel a major hub for that? So if you think about protein, most of the protein that we consume today is from animal sources. And animal protein requires a lot of land. And the amount of natural resources on earth, in Israel especially, are finite and they're limited. Animals take a lot of land because it's not just the cow, the cow's space that it needs to live, but it's all of the food that you need to grow for the cow, for raising the cow, for breeding the cow over its lifespan. So that ends up being a lot of arable land and a lot of water. And there's also an efficiency loss when you convert a plant protein into animal protein because protein goes to do other things like create a brain and bones and skin and other things. So animal protein is pretty inefficient. The kind of focus in Israel on innovation and innovative technologies and just the awareness of our limited amount of land has kind of contributed to Israel becoming basically a hub for alternative protein.

In the space of alternative protein in the world, would you say Israel would rank maybe number one in innovation?

Israel is number one in terms of number of companies per capita in alternative protein. And that includes plant-based meat alternatives, plant-based proteins, cultivated meat, precision fermentation, fermentation-based protein. So if you think about just like cattle versus fungi-based protein, cattle requires about 200 square miles for one kilo of edible protein, and fungi is less than one. So 200 times more.

That's unbelievable. And I read some weird statistic. It takes a thousand cow stem cells to make over four billion pounds of beef. Does that even sound right? Those quantities are just unbelievable. I mean, you're just pulling out some stem cells from a cow, creating this large quantity of cultivated meat.

You need one cow, and then you only need it for 10 minutes. You just swab it, and then it can keep going and it can roam in the field and do whatever it wants. Then you take those cells, and then that's it. You have the DNA, you have the cells, and you can work with that. You can create theoretically cultivated meat for the entire planet. Well, let's stay on this for a second. What's the process? Essentially, swab an animal, call it a cow, and you have that DNA in those cells. And from that, using bioreactors and different scientific methods, you can grow an immense amount of meat. Of course, there's a lot of processes behind it and a lot of selection in the nutshell. That's it. It's a science project.

There's an opportunity to feed many, many people with this food technology. Maybe end hunger? Is this what we're hoping for here? This is the big aha.

Um, I would say we're probably far from ending hunger, unfortunately, but there is a reality that the amount of natural resources on the planet are finite. And if we're gonna grow in population as we've been growing as humans, and we're estimated to be 10 billion people by 2050, there just isn't enough land and fresh water to feed people in the same way that they've been eating. So that's gonna have to change. We're gonna have to innovate on how food is made. Right now, cultivated meat is pretty expensive to make it. And so most of the innovations are focused on how can we create this at scale at a cost that makes sense so that you know eventually we could solve hunger, but it's far out. How does it taste? Do you want to eat a cultivated steak? I don't eat meat, so I don't, but it is identical to meat. It is meat, it's just grown in a different way. It is the same. The plant-based burgers, they're trying to mimic meat, and some people say that they taste better, some people say that they don't taste the same. That's a matter of opinion, but it is actually not meat. So that makes sense. But this cultivated meat is just meat.

So Israel is revolutionizing. I'm gonna just throw this out there. I'm putting words in your mouth, um, the food tech scene here. If you're an investor, is this the right time to be investing in food tech, specifically in the Israeli food space?

Yeah, so I think Israel has substantially prioritized food security in the last year. Summer of 2024, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development changed its name to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security. And that is because food security has become a major priority. There's a lot of funding from the government, grants, infrastructure development coming in for this. And the premise is that food security is a big component of overall security for the nation and for self-reliance. There's a lot of investment, a lot of attention, a lot of focus, a lot of people focus on this in Israel.

We just had an episode with one of the head researchers of the Weizmann Institute, and a lot of amazing food tech is coming out of that incredible science source in Israel. As you know, this is a podcast that's highlighting what Israelis bring to mankind. And it seems like food technology is one of those sources of assistance it's giving to the world.

When you're talking about a circular economy and using a limited amount of resources to produce as much as you can and being efficient and being scrappy with what you have, I mean, that is Israel, right? That's what Israel is really good at. And that is what the whole world is focused on right now in terms of food innovation. And it is a little bit of an existential crisis because without food, nothing else really matters. Absolutely. Thanks, Jennifer. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to the Israeli Trailblazers podcast. I'll be back in two weeks with another episode. Until then, I'm your host, Jennifer Weisman.