Dr. Tom Cohen Ben-Arye is a post-doc researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an Adjunct Prof. at Shantou University Medical college and a lecturer at Bar-Ilan University.
He is one of the founders of the alternative protein field in Israel. He was a founding team member and Chief Scientist at The Good Food Institute Israel and the Modern Agriculture Foundation, and was an advisor to government bodies, corporations, startups, and academia. He developed an academic course on alternative proteins, taught at universities in Israel and internationally.
His PhD research focused on bovine skeletal muscle tissue engineering that was published in Nature Food and formed Aleph Farms. He holds degrees in molecular biochemistry, nanoscience, and nanotechnology, with specialization in tissue engineering and high-throughput single-cell analysis.
He recently relocated to China, where he is developing breakthrough technologies for breeding meat-like yeast strains, with the goal of reducing costs and improving the mimicry of meat alternatives.
The dietary shift dwarfs transportation effects. Animal agriculture is dramatically more emissions-intensive than transport associated with grocery shopping.
This is a thoughtful suggestion, and technically it’s quite feasible. The key issue, though, is effortlessness, which is the main behavioral bottleneck we’re trying to solve.
A Chrome extension (or app) is, by definition, an opt-in solution. It only helps people who are already motivated enough to discover it, install it, and keep using it. In practice, that means it mainly serves committed vegans - not the much larger group of new vegans, flexitarians, or people trying to reduce animal products, where most of the impact lies.
By contrast, a native vegan filter inside the supermarket UI is default-available, works on mobile, and requires zero setup. That difference matters a lot: friction at the point of purchase is one of the strongest predictors of vegan dropout.
We agree that LLMs, crowdsourcing, and user corrections are promising for data generation. In fact, those approaches are likely part of the backend solution. But as a delivery mechanism, browser extensions don’t scale to mainstream users in the way platform-level features do.
In short: the proposed extension could be a useful prototype or data-gathering tool, but it doesn’t solve the core problem - making vegan shopping effortless for everyone, by default.
Great point—thank you for raising it.
Yes, Ocado is one of the few strong real-world examples of what we’re proposing. Similarly, Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, offers a comparable vegan filter and is often cited as a key contributor to the country’s high adoption of plant-based diets.
We summarized the Albert Heijn case here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Sc1Yun2HXjPx-7jJVrs-lKDzTrlI10Rk4k_5q4ZOs9M/edit
The key point, though, is that cases like Ocado and Albert Heijn are exceptions, not the norm. Most online supermarkets lack the resources and incentives to systematically review and continuously update tens of thousands of SKUs for vegan status.
Because this intervention has high potential impact but is rarely implemented, it’s exactly where an external, mission-driven actor can add the most value. The goal is to make what works in a few frontrunners common everywhere.
Hi， great to hear of your direction. my recommendation is to learn as much as possible about meat science, measurement and texturization tools. I'd try to get into a meat-alternative lab, especially in Wageningen university. Later on, I would try to make an impact in less-developed ecosystems, such as the Chinese ecosystem.