Redefine Meat appoints Alon Bar-Shany as executive chairman

Alon Bar-Shany well known as the protagonist of HP Indigo digital printing’s success for the past 15 years has most recently joined Isreali alternate meat manufacturer, Redefine Meat. The announcement came on 5 May 2021 that Bar-Shany would play a defining role in the commercialization and expansion of Redefine’s 3D printed alt meat.

Bar-Shany after resigning from HP in June 2020 continued to work there for some time to ensure a smooth transition and then joined Israeli digital print decoration company Highcon in January 2021 as its chairman. And then he apparently joined Twine Solutions on 11 May 2021, another Israeli company engaged in digital textile production, as its active chairman of the board. Twine’s approach to on-demand and sustainable textiles is a digitally controlled waterless dying process of polyester thread.

Shany to play a lead role in Redefine Meat’s commercialization and global expansions

Bar-Shany is expected to play a leading role in Redefine Meat’s commercialization and global expansion. Redefine Meat has a proprietary digital manufacturing technology to produce plant based meats ranging from alt ground beef to alt beef steaks. The company says it has achieved an acceptance of over 90% among meat eaters in the world’s largest blind tasting conducted in partnership with Best Meister, an Israeli meat distributor.

In February of this year, Redefine Meat raised investor funding of US$ 29 million – said to be the largest every funding raised by an alternative meat company in an A round. There are a number of companies around the world engaged in producing plant based alternatives to meat – seen as a necessary shift to reduce the humongous carbon footprint of one the fastest growing sources of protein in spite of a shift to vegetarianism by a small but significant ‘woke’ demographic in the developed economies.

Bar-Shany said on the occasion, “Sustainability has always been a huge passion of mine, so my involvement with Redefine Meat allows me to help solve one of the world’s biggest problems. It has become clear that future generations may not be able to consume meat at all if we are not responsible for the consequences of our actions today.”

CEO The co-founder and CEO of Redefine Meat, Eshchar Ben-Shitrit said, “Adam Lahav, co-founder of Redefine, and I both started our careers at HP Indigo over a decade ago and Alon has been a role model for us ever since. We are honored to have him join us and the timing is perfect as we are preparing our global launch and sales plan. In the long term, I am confident that his innovation and risk-taking will help shape Redefine Meat’s culture, goals and achievements and enable us to become the largest meat company in the world.”

Our view

As I have written before I have watched and only occasionally interacted with Alon Bar-Shany over the past 20 years. I have hardly ever missed an opportunity to listen to him at exhibitions and press conferences and have witnessed his enormous learning of packaging concepts and constraints that may have been familiar to printers and converters but were generally new to him. At each next event he came back to talk about or demonstrate another innovation that incrementally advanced HP Indigo’s capabilities.

Always curious about what he would do next, I did wonder if Highcon presented enough of a challenge. Twine sounds like a more formidable challenge and for a person who stayed with one company for so many years one can only speculate that Bar-Shany was looking for the right paradigm. One that fits both his imagination, his empathy with other cultures and his knowledge of digitally controlled material deposition technology.