On June 17, 2015, Fast Company's Adele Peters reported the first commercial partnership Pembient had announced publicly: an agreement with one of Beijing's largest breweries to release a beer infused with the company's synthetic horn. The piece notes the older, smaller, illegal trade in homemade horn-infused spirits and positions the beer as a way to take that trade legal, public, and high-volume.
The piece also crystallizes Markus's most-quoted line, the one Pembient critics still cite as evidence that the company's strategy was to flood, not reduce, the market.
Peters reports the Vietnamese consumer research the company had commissioned, with figures consistent with what the Guardian had reported a month earlier: 15 percent acceptance for water buffalo horn as a substitute, 45 percent acceptance for a bio-identical lab horn. The piece also raises, for the first time in the press, the law-enforcement objection that would later become the basis of the Center for Biological Diversity petition. If the synthetic is genetically identical, how do customs officers tell a poached horn from a printed one? Pembient's answer: a DNA watermark. The objection would not go away.
