The former owner of Daniele prosciutto and now cultivated meat investor, Davide Dukcevich joins me on The Plantbased Business Hour with Elysabeth Alfano to discuss the outlook for cultivated meat AND the outlook for meat.
Specifically, we discussed
- Why would someone whose family founded a meat company, Daniele known for its prosciutto, be interested in cultivated meat?
- When did you realize that change was afoot in the meat industry and how do you see this transpiring in today’s convoluted world?
- When will we see the supply chain issues be addressed in cultivated meat and what kind of capital will that take? Will it be blended capital, and if so, how much? Will we see ‘S-curve capital’ before we see ‘S-curve adoption’?
- What innovations are you most excited to see?
Below is a highlight clip and transcription from our long-form conversation.
Elysabeth: Today’s guest is the former owner of Daniele, which back in the day when I was eating meat was my one and only go-to prosciutto. Daniele is the best in class, if you will. If you are interested in that kind of thing, which back in the day I was. Davide, let’s hope I get this right. Davide Dukcevich, thank you for being on the Plantbased Business Hour today.
Okay, so you obviously are from a meat eating and loving business family. You sell in 2019 and now among many other things, you’re investing and one of them is cultivated meat. Can you tell me why you’re investing in cultivated meat and the other things you’re investing in?
Davide Dukcevich: Yeah, so we sold the company in 2019. 2020 of course was Covid and me and my wife and we’ve got three little kids, we decided the year after the sale to spend a year in Europe. You know, I dropped the kids off at school and I would just go hiking on these beautiful trails in the mountains and I listened to a lot of podcasts. One of the podcasts that just kind of blew my mind was about cellular agriculture and lab grown meat.
It was the first time I’d ever heard of the concept and I was thunderstruck by it. I think one of the reasons that it was so impactful is because, you know, I saw how technology revolutionized so many industries, most namely Uber with taxis or AirBNB with hotels. And I was always wondering how technology would revolutionize this ancient industry that I was in, the meat industry? I knew that there was going to be something, right? I just didn’t know what it would be.
So there I was walking on this trail for the first time hearing about this technology and it was mind-blowing. And like everybody else who hears about this technology for the first time and is excited about it, the ramifications of it are just so exceptional. Especially for someone like me who, sadly, my family was using hundreds of millions of hogs a year to make our products. So I felt like it would be such a great technology to commercialize. You know, I remember growing up as a kid and there was a famous movie called Babe. Remember with a piglet?
Elysabeth: Oh yes. James Cromwell, whom I’ve interviewed and who has been on this show and the famous line is, “That’ll do, pig.” Yes, I know it well.
Davide Dukcevich: I couldn’t bring myself to watch the movie. I’d get ten minutes in and it was so heartbreaking because of my family’s line of work. It looked like such a beautiful movie and I grew up loving animals, you know? Even when I would go see the hog farms I always had a special sort of connection to the animals. So I thought, “Wow this technology could be such a nice sort of ethical punctuation mark maybe to my life and to my family story.”
I took it very, very personally and needless to say, obviously the ramifications of the environment are so wonderful and of the human pathogens and strains that come from the animals. So there are all of these other great benefits. I got really kind of mesmerized by it and I went home from that walk and I did all this research. I learned that my alma mater- I went to Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. So it turned out that Tufts, bizarrely, was at the forefront of this study. I don’t know, it seemed to me like there was something there that I needed to explore more, almost like it was calling out to me personally.
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