And Now, a Moment for Culture(d Meat)

If you’re doing it right, your Thanksgiving leftovers should be gone by now (so many turkey+stuffing+gravy sandwiches!).

Evidently, preparing for Thanksgiving in the middle of a year-long pandemic was a “logistical nightmare” for BIG TURKEY (Butterball, Perdue, Foster Farms, etc.), thanks to labor shortages and reduced family gatherings.

This got me wondering how long it will be before we see lab-grown, cultured turkey on the tables. Sure, cultured meat still has to overcome issues around scale, affordability and widespread governmental approval. And there are some who doubt whether cultured meat will ever become a thing at all.

But as an industry sector, cultured meat’s march towards our dinner table continues to make gains. Just this week, Eat Just announced today that it received the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured chicken in Singapore. And that’s just the latest development capping off what has been a robust year in the cell cultured meat space that has also featured:

• Meat-Tech announced that it had successfully 3D-printed a cultured beef fat structure composed of bovine fat cells and bio ink grown from stem cells
• Future Meat is using fibroblast cells to help bring down the cost of cultured meat
• SuperMeat opened up a restaurant that serves its cell-based chicken (in exchange for your opinion)
• NovaMeat started testing its 3D printing technology on cell culture + plant-based meat hybrids
• BioBQ is developed cell-based brisket
• Vow is developing a cell-based meat platform portfolio that includes goat, pork and kangaroo
• BlueNalu announced it’s opening a new production facility next year for its cultured seafood
• Mosa Meat said it achieved an 80x reduction in medium cost for creating lab-grown meat
• Higher Steaks created the world’s first lab-grown bacon and pork belly

And that doesn’t even include the Ouroboros Steak art project that designed a kit for creating cell-based human meat. (Relax, it’s not real.) (We hope.)

While 2020 has been a pretty garbage year for the most part, that just hasn’t been the case for cell-based meats. As you can see from the assortment of stories, lot of companies are working on the problem from a lot of different angles, and all of them are making progress.

Now, we won’t be serving lab-grown turkey next year (or, presumably the year after that), but watching all these startups innovate on food tech that could help make food production more abundant and equitable is something to be thankful for.

Tetra’s Tiny Dishwasher (Finally) Headed to Market

Heatworks’ Tetra countertop dishwasher is an example of a product that I totally don’t need and yet totally want.

We first covered the Tetra back at CES 2018, where we were enthralled by the diminutive dishwasher that could clean a few settings of dishes with only a half gallon of water in ten minutes. Fun!

Well, things have been quiet on the Tetra front since that CES and we were wondering if the device would ever actually make it to market. Turns out, the company was trying to solve the complex issue around soap dispensing in its machine.

This week, Heatworks announced that it has partnered with BASF to make that complicated mechanism and bring the Tetra to market. According to the press announcement, the improved Tetra “will be designed to deliver custom solutions and dosing, dependent on the selected wash cycle, ensuring each cleaning cycle is optimized. Tetra’s cartridges will last for multiple loads and consumers will be able to sign up for a subscription, so that cartridges are shipped to them automatically.”

That last part about a proprietary soap cartridge is a bit of a bummer. We’re not a big fan of Keurig-style solutions that lock you into a particular ecosystem. But we are happy to see that the Tetra is still alive and expected to be available in the back half of 2021.

More Headlines

Exclusive: Blendid and Jamba Co-Brand New Smoothie Robot – The robot is now open for business at a Walmart in Dixon, California. This is the first co-branded robot from Blendid and its second to open up at a Walmart.

Zuul Teams Up With Thrillist to Launch Rotating Ghost Kitchen – A series of 10 different NYC restaurants will each hold a two-week residency offering exclusive delivery-only meal offerings made out of Zuul’s ghost kitchen facility in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood.

The Spoon’s Plant-Based Egg Round-Up – Plant-based eggs are poised to become the next big thing in the plant-based space, and it can be hard to keep up with all of the companies involved in this industry. We’ve pulled together some of the emerging and bigger players in this space.

3D Meat Printing Startup SavorEat Goes Public – The Israeli startup has had an initial public offering (IPO) on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), raising NIS 42.6 million ($13 million) in funding.

HungryPanda Raises $70M to Provide Food Delivery to Overseas Chinese Customers – The London, U.K.-based company will use the new funds to continue its global expansion, delivering authentic Chinese restaurant food and groceries to Chinese people living abroad.

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