Future Food, the interview
The year is 2052 and Atlas Pacific, lead journalist with Salmon Media Holdings is sitting down to interview Dr Kobold Lacuna, CEO and Future Food Tycoon of DG Industries
I've been offline these last few weeks touring the US with the International Visitors Leadership Program. I'm still synthesising insights from three weeks of meetings and will start feeding them into future posts. Needless to say, it was the rarest of opportunities to hear from STEM leaders across the US at this unique historical moment. My thanks goes to the liaisons who travelled with us, the State Department's support for our visit, and the many hours dedicated to our group from thought leaders across the country.
This post was conceived before I left Australia and it bubbled away in my mind as we hit four very different US cities. I’m continuing our dive into the food vertical with a new biofutures scenario. I find the biofutures scenarios the most difficult to write, so once again I'm going to play with form and fiction.
You'll find below an interview transcript recorded in June of 2052.
The interview is between Atlas Pacific (AP), a journalist of Salmon Media Holdings, with Dr Kobold Lacuna (KL), a future food tycoon and CEO of DG Industries.
AP: Thank you Dr Kobold Lacuna for joining us, it's a privilege to hear from you, this is what, your first interview in over a decade?
KL: It's wonderful to be with you Atlas, and yes, I have become somewhat of a hermit. I like to live out my days on my research vessel with the open ocean on all sides. But my PR team like to remind me that we should celebrate three decades of operations, so here I am.
AP: You are one of the richest people on the planet, and DG Industries has transformed food consumption for billions of people. I wonder if you could start by telling us about the early years. You spent five years in stealth mode before anyone even knew the company existed. Could you tell us about that time?
KL: I founded DG Industries on a simple premise, that food production no longer matched our biological boundaries, and that these boundaries urgently needed engineered expansion. The early years were some of the best. Our founding intellectual property was a biomass patterning platform that allowed us to batch grow proteins, fats, bone and complex carbohydrates for both natural biomimicry and creative xenobiotics. Frozen mango, triple brie, chicken mince, t-bone steak, we could do it all. But replicating the existing dinner plate bored me, I never found competing with tradition to be a winning formula. Also, there was no creativity to it.
Our key insight came from combining truffle aromatics with nutrient dense mouthfeel and enhanced fractal patterned biomass. When we trademarked Blue Eclipse we had a Mandelbrot set that melted in your mouth with unbridled flavour. It’s still one of our most successful product lines. We had to re-learn the lessons of Ford’s “faster horses”. People didn’t know what was possible, and as a consequence, they didn't know what they wanted.
AP: And what did people want?
KL: We called it the quin-tick, people wanted five things - they wanted flavour, mouthfeel, nutrition, satiety and culture. The last two were inherently interlinked, the feeling of being full is as much a social experience as it is a chemical one. New food meant new cultural experiences that augmented and built upon millennia of human traditions. We partnered with high-end restaurants, food bloggers, fast food and grocery chains to transform what people believed food could be. But most importantly, our early success hinged on the subtle use of truffle aromatics. These fungi evolved the perfect combination of aromas for signalling and queuing hunger in animals. We built on that and basically hacked human taste and olfactory sense organs. Just peeling the packet on our original product line excites the emotional centre of the brain to a degree not possible in natural food unless you’re a truffle hunting dog. When combined with unique biomass patterns and some branding wizardry, we had a winning formula no one could compete with.
AP: Let’s fast forward a few years to the early 2030s. How did you capitalise on this early success?
KL: We scaled globally in the first decade. I think we were producing meals for a billion mouths by 2035. It was at that point I stepped back from our xenobiotics work and started thinking through new markets we needed to play in. The fundamental problem that attracted me back then was the absence of a consumer killer app for synthetic biology. I also knew DG’s business model had a problem.
We recruited the best bioprocessing engineers on the planet, and we had all of the best chefs as brand partners, but we still lacked imagination when it came to developing new menus. I pulled together a secret project team in a Skunkworks that was our first marine research vessel. We refitted an oil tanker to carry a monstrous AI model training setup and parked it off Antarctica so that the polar waters could feed natural ice water coolant to the server racks. We built OpenTable, a xenobiotic menu AI that allowed anyone to compose a new food feast based on multimedia and text prompting. We then upgraded our fast-growth and logistics backbone to allow users to design a completely new food on their phone and have it shipped to them the next day. They could control taste profile, nutrients, mouthfeel and even sculpt the biomass pattern in 3D. It was something that only became possible in that moment because food regulations had finally caught up to the speed of cellag innovations.
AP: OpenTable changed everything, but you certainly saw some challenges. What was the technology adoption process like?
KL: Like all technologies we had early adopters followed by a ballooning mass of widespread product dispersion. Our key was that we had a monopoly on the platform and distribution. The moment everything changed was when we started letting consumers share their menus and monetise designs. Food prompting became a profession in its own right with novel food experiences being delivered to your door. The mushroom squid steak recipe hit a million mouths in the first week and became a global sensation. It was developed by a six year old in Wyoming who put a Wiggles song into the prompting engine with a photo of a giant squid. They made close to $1m in subscriber fees from our platform before they were seven.
It was at this time that I changed DG’s motto to ‘feed the world’ and we meant it. Back then our mission was not just to feed every human, but to feed every organism on the planet. We believed our supply chain could touch every mouth on Earth, our hubris got ahead of us. The scaling challenge never goes away, no matter how advanced your logistics and production. We were breaking ground on food foundries weekly across every city on the planet and as a consequence our biomass input costs started to meaningfully impact global commodity markets. The global drought of 2034 almost bankrupted us, but we had a few high net worth backers step in at the right moment and they fueled an aggressive merger and acquisition strategy that meant we entered 2040 as the only name in future food.
AP: Around this time you started a new product line in sentinel agriculture and aquaculture. Why the shift in focus?
KL: By the late 2030s we’d been watching traditional agri and aqua closely because we were worried they might collapse following a major climate event and that would place enormous pressure on us to fill the production gap immediately. We simply couldn’t scale that fast and we were worried about the global PR fallout if a giga famine became the fault of DG Industries not being able to feed the world. We realised we needed real-time data on where crops and stocks were failing to anticipate spikes in cellag demand. We also realised farmers, bankers and insurers needed this data too. We partnered with them all on our sentinel agri/aqua platforms. We had 7G connections pulling data from natural and engineered plantings and mycelium streaming straight to LEO. We knew nutrient uptake, disease X encounters, heat stress, water stress and more, on a second-by-second basis. Once we started to correlate this data on geographic scales, we could anticipate and predict a particular terroir becoming unsuitable to cropping with about six months notice, we could also predict stock losses for fish, feed and meat. That was enough time for us to properly counterbalance with our own industrial production to respond to food shortages in the market before they happened. Within the space of a few years we became the dominant force in agri and aqua commodity markets owning spot, options and futures price moves. We shored up traditional food commodities as natural crop failure accelerated.
AP: We’re in the mid 2040s now, and you surprised everyone by changing tact again. Why did you push the company into space?
KL: Our mission is to feed the world, it made infinite sense for us to build R&D labs in orbit, on Luna and Mars. We’ve also got high pressure labs under the sea, freezer labs in Antarctica, and heat stress labs in the Empty Quarter. This is our extreme biomanufacturing R&D arm, many of our best scientists request to be assigned to these programs. We push the boundaries of biology to put new food experiences on the dinner table. Orange Tangle is a food experience that would never have been prototyped without the Martian environment. Food is a topographical experience and to expand the surface area of food opportunity you have to push biology to its very limits. That’s why I live on a marine research vessel, it’s not just the solace and the peace, but I believe we can feed a trillion people on earth if we solve for the saltwater industrial nexus. The oceans have immense potential for floating platforms of new cities built on future food production and consumption. When it comes to humans, all begins and ends with food, but we’re only now beginning to acquire the IP that might let us grow the sustainable mechanics of a floating city. Like everything we’ve done, we’ll start small and iterate. Because if there is one thing biology does well, it is to grow.
AP: So when you look to the next thirty years of DG Industries, what do you see?
KL: The scaling challenge I’m focused on is the joule limit to life on Earth. What I mean by this is that if you sum up the sustainable energy inputs available on the planet to the end of this century - like solar, geothermal, wind, water and nuclear - and you subtract the energy needed to sustain and grow natural systems of deep biodiversity, then what’s left over has to cover the gap for human civilisation. Our platform is built on biomass patterning at the centimetre scale, we’re now working to scale this up to the metre scale with a vision for the kilometre scale. Obviously this would mean stepping out of the food category altogether. But if the last thirty years has taught me anything, it’s that if you can grow a biomass pattern and you can put the prompting platform in the hands of the consumer, then AI-enabled co-design will deliver more than you can possibly imagine. We have a vision bigger than food now, we want to grow every material in human civilisation in the most energy efficient way possible. That means new materials with new functionality, harnessing all that life has to offer. We want to expand our biological boundaries of being.
AP: You’ve been described in many ways across your career, can I get you to reflect on a few of my favourite quotes? “Food is life, Kobold has hacked my palate and changed my kitchen”, “I'll never look at a dinner plate the same way again, how did people even eat last century?”, and “Kobold has put more farmers out of business than any single individual in history”.
KL: Let me address the last two quotes first, because they are two sides to the same coin. From the beginning, DG Industries has sourced most of its bioprocessing engineers via an apprenticeship model almost exclusively from the agri and aqua sectors. Ensuring a just transition has been a huge focus of our work and it makes infinite sense because the logistics chains for food don’t need to replicated. Sure we can tinker with last mile delivery, but the biomass that fuels our platform has to be grown somewhere, it needs to be harvested, collected, aggregated and shipped to a foundry for manufacture. We always wanted to augment the logistics chain that existed for classical food, not to parrallelise it.
Future food also means more than augmentation of logistics, it means new opportunity space for creativity across the full stack. The field of computational gastronomy was a major driver for our thinking, it still is. But as with all verticals in engineering biology, we don’t just look to what is and what was, our vision is born from a desire to know what could be. That’s the beauty of xenobiotics, they’re new to the world food and beverage experiences the enable creativity in cultural rituals, an augmentation of social fora, and most importantly, novelty in our ways of being. We haven’t had such an opportunity in cuisine creativity since the agricultural produce of the Americas was first brought back to Europe.
AP: Dr Lacuna, it's been a pleasure, I hope it isn’t another ten years before your next interview.
KL: Thank you Atlas, we’ll see.
The Biofutures series paints scenarios with the techniques of applied foresight and the elbow grease of imagination. These scenarios are intended to push the boundaries of what you believe is possible.