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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Alternative Protein

Japanese Academic and Corporate Partners Launch Cultivated Meat Consortium

This week, a group of Japanese academic and corporate partners announced the creation of the Consortium for Future Innovation by Cultured Meat, a new group that aims to promote “concrete efforts for social implementation of edible cultured meat manufacturing technology using 3D bioprinting.”

The group, which includes the Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, Shimadzu Corporation, Itoham Yonekyu Holdings Inc., Toppan Printing Co., Ltd, Inc., and SIGMAXYZ Inc., stated it will focus on the development and application of 3D bioprinting technology, the establishment of a consistent value chain from production to distribution, and the contribution to the establishment of laws and regulations through cooperation with government agencies and private companies.

In August 2021, Osaka University and Toppan Printing published a paper outlining the technology for 3D printing fibrous tissues, such as muscle, fat, and blood vessels. The group’s efforts will be centered around Osaka University’s 3D bioprinting technology, which allows the creation of muscle tissue structures at will, and can be applied to the fields of food as well as regenerative medicine and drug discovery.

Press conference announcing Consortium for Future Innovation by Cultured Meat

Alongside the establishment of this consortium, Osaka University, Itoham Yonekyu, and Toppan Printing have opened a joint research course for “social implementation” of cultured meat on the Suita campus of Osaka University. This joint research course and the Osaka University-Shimadzu Analytical Innovation Collaborative Research Laboratory established in December 2019, will serve as the research promotion base for the consortium.

According to the announcement, the group has designated different roles for the member companies. From the announcement: Organizations participating in the consortium are “management partners” who engage in technological development, cooperation with government agencies and related organizations, and disseminate information to the outside world, “R&D partners” who engage in joint research in specific technical areas, and dissemination of cultivated meat-related technologies and products. It consists of “social implementation partners” who are responsible for disseminating information to Osaka University, Shimadzu, Itoham Yonekyu, Toppan Printing, and Sigmaxis will act as “operating partners”. 

The group has plans to showcase the technology in action at the ‘Osaka Healthcare Pavilion Nest for Reborn’ at the Osaka Kansai Expo, where it will exhibit automated cultured meat production equipment. Through this exhibition, the consortium plans to present cultured meat as one of the “foods of the future” which it says has the potential to reduce the environmental burden and help solve the global protein shortage, leading to the promotion of consumer understanding.

The new consortium isn’t the first organization in Japan for cultivated meat. In 2021, a group led by Integriculture announced the CulNet Consortium, a group intended to be an open innovation platform for the development of cell-cultured meat in Japan and beyond. In January of this year, Integriculture debuted cultivated foie gras from duck liver-derived cells, which it developed using the CulNet Consortium framework.

CULT Scoops Up Assets From Cultivated Meat Pet Food Startup Because Animals, Fresh Off Investment By Marc Lustig

This week CULT Food Sciences announced it had signed a binding letter to acquire some of Because Animals Inc.’s consumer brand assets, related patents, non-scientific intellectual property, and product formulations.

The acquisition of some of the assets of Because Animals, one of the first startups dedicated to creating pet food using cultivated meat, comes just weeks after CULT announced that Canadian entrepreneur, Marc Lustig, had acquired 15% of the company through the purchase of 27 million shares of CULT. With the deal, Lustig, a cannabis industry executive who sold his company Origin House for $1.1 billion in 2019, becomes CULT’s biggest shareholder. While the terms of Lustig’s investment were undisclosed, 27 million shares of CULT tallied to about ~$2 million based on CULT’s stock price at the time.

While it’s unclear if the two deals were connected, what is clear is the move to bring some of Because Animals’ IP into the fold has been in the works for some time, as it follows the announcement in November that Because Animals’ cofounder, Joshua Errett, was appointed as CULT’s VP of Product. Errett is one of the inventors behind some of the key patents for the company.

With the move, CULT, which describes itself as a company focused on the investment, development, and commercialization of cellular agriculture technologies and products, will expand its products into the pet food space. The company, which also has investments in a variety of different cellular agriculture-based startups, has already launched consumer-facing products such as cell-based coffee and candy.

The terms of the deal involve Further Foods Inc., a subsidiary of CULT, acquiring the assets from Joshua Errett in exchange for a USD$500,000 promissory note bearing interest at 4.35% and an initial 10% ownership stake in Further. Additional ownership stakes in Further will be issued to the vendor based on revenue generated by the assets after the closing of the transaction.

“Eliminating factory-farmed meats in the foods we feed our companion animals will have wide-ranging effects on our society, with ripples through our food chain, economy, and of course, environment,” Errett said in the announcement. “We can reimagine our entire food system, starting with what we put under our dogs’ and cats’ noses every day. I am personally devoted to this cause, as today’s announcement makes clear. I’m looking forward to continuing my important work on this amazing brand.”

But Wait a Minute…

While some of Because Animals’ assets are being sold to CULT, the remaining founder of Because Animals,  Shannon Falconer, made it clear that the company is still a going concern and is still focused on creating cultivated meat-powered pet food.

Falconer and Because Animals sent the following statement to The Spoon, Green Queen and others:

“Cultured meat is what our customers and future manufacturing partners have been asking us for, and this is what we’re prioritizing. The company’s strength is our scientific prowess, and since scientific innovation is key to bringing cultured meat to market, we made the decision to apply laser focus to achieving that feat and to divest ourselves of any and all non-core assets that were not required to realize that objective.” 

“We were surprised to see the announcement by CULT Food Science ‘CULT Food Science Announces Binding Letter of Intent to Acquire Because Animals Consumer Brands and Formulations’ as CULT was at no point involved in our divestiture, nor was Because Animals contacted by CULT prior to their publication. Although it’s not clear from their press release, the consumer brand ‘Because Animals’ was not acquired.” 

“Because Animals retains all of its intellectual property relating to cultured meat – which is our core business – and we are committed to revolutionizing the pet food industry with this technology.”

Because Animals said in the statement the assets heading to CULT were nutritional yeast-based products it discontinued in late 2022. It was these product formulations for these products and two provisional patents related to the discontinued products it agreed to sell Errett. 

Vow Debuts The Mammoth Meatball, Made With Protein From The Extinct Species

When Nathan Myhrvold talked about recreating meat from long-extinct species at Smart Kitchen Summit, he went back as far as the dinosaur period. While Vow hasn’t quite done that (yet), they have created a meatball using protein derived from the gene sequence of the woolly mammoth myoglobin, the protein which gives meat its color and flavor.

The achievement was announced today via a blog post by the Australian company’s founder, George Peppou, detailing how Vow created the mammoth meatball. According to the company, the project involved generating over 20 billion cells on a surface area of more than 100 square meters, a footprint the company describes as akin to a local café.

The company, in partnership with Professor Ernst Wolvetang, at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering at the University of Queensland, used a publicly available database to find the gene sequence for mammoth myoglobin, filling in any gaps with the myoglobin sequence from the African elephant, the woolly mammoth’s closest living relative. From there, Vow and Wolvetang’s team inserted the mammoth myoglobin gene into sheep cells, which were then cultivated to create the mammoth meatball.

Recreating a close facsimile of meat from a long-extinct species is no doubt an impressive feat, something that, in a way, could convince some skeptics of the value of cultivated meat. But, on the other hand, making meat available from creatures that haven’t roamed the earth for a million years might also creep some others out.

Either way, Vow certainly has achieved its goal with the project, which, according to them, was to “serve as a starting point” for conversation.

Woolly mammoth image from Quagga Wildlife art used under creative commons license.

A Tale of Two Startups: Why Cultivated Meat is So Close (And Yet so Far) From Disrupting Animal Ag

Last week, two contrasting stories painting very different pictures emerged from the cultivated meat industry.

The first highlighted the news that GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat arm of Eat Just, had received a “no questions” letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its cultivated meat product. This makes the company the second to gain FDA approval after UPSIDE Foods, demonstrating the industry’s proximity to finally bringing meat produced outside of animals to consumers.

The other news came from the founder of New Age Eats, Brian Spears, who announced the company’s closure in a LinkedIn post. According to Spears, the company was far from generating revenue, and due to recent retrenchment from venture investors, it failed to raise the necessary funds to continue.

From his post:

In our regulated industry, we can’t and won’t be able to sell for a while. Without revenue, we rely on other sources of capital. Investors proved to be the most efficient way to validate whether cultivated meat would be commercially viable. Unfortunately, with recent capital market turmoil, we have been unable to attract investment.

While the stories each tells are very different, together they underscore the precarious nature of this emerging industry. On one hand, the cultivated meat industry is tantalizingly close to commercializing a business with considerable potential to help end the cruel and environmentally damaging industrial animal agriculture industry. On the other hand, it reveals that creating meat in bioreactors involves a long, challenging, and highly capital-intensive journey that will likely see many early pioneers fail or be acquired by competitors before ever selling a product.

When I talked with Po Bronson, the managing director of IndieBio, back in November, he predicted that this year would see many companies struggle to raise their next round of funding and seek buyers.

“What I think we’re going to see here is markets constrict,” Bronson said on the Spoon Podcast. “They already are constricting right now. And you’re going to see a lot of companies unable to raise their next round.”

Of course, the difficulty of raising money isn’t unique to cultivated meat companies. Pretty much every category of startup is beginning to feel the pressure nowadays, a pressure no doubt made even more acute with the recent demise of SVB. But unlike many startup categories, cultivated meat has a particularly difficult problem in that the industry has a much longer road toward revenue than many of these industries.

In fact, while many companies like GOOD Meat and UPSIDE are already pretty far down the path towards commercializing this business, the amount of production capacity available to even the most well-funded and commercially mature cultivated meat startups is still just a tiny fraction of what they will eventually need to start producing meat to make even a small dent in traditional animal agriculture. To achieve mass-production scale, billions more will be needed to expand production capacity, develop cost-effective commercialization processes and technology, and educate consumers about this new form of meat.

This is why organizations like the Good Food Institute and the startups themselves have started advocating for government funding to assist with late-stage capital. In its latest outlook on the investment landscape for alternative proteins, GFI cited investment in the electric vehicle market as a potential model for the alt protein sector:

While global public investment in alternative proteins is growing, it is a drop in the bucket compared to other public climate investments. For example, global governments committed $500 billion to renewable energy development in 2022. The United States alone committed $7.5 billion last year to build a national network of electric vehicle charging stations. To realize a sustainable, secure, and equitable protein production system, governments must increase their commitments to alternative proteins, and the current market provides an opportunity to do so. 

I think this is the right thing to do, but I’m unsure how fast we’ll see similar dollar amounts flow from the U.S. government, especially given how entrenched traditional animal agriculture is as a political force. While billions in government subsidies are certainly a possibility, it’s hardly a foregone conclusion, and most likely not something we’ll see in the next couple of years.

Where does this leave the cultivated meat industry? In the near term, we’ll see accelerating industry consolidation. Early startups with promising technology in creating a particular type of cultivated meat will get acquired, as some of the bigger companies start to roll up technology to fast-track their efforts. We’ll also see more “full stack” companies that have the different pieces of the puzzle – multiple cell lines, enabling infrastructure, sustainable and FBS-free growth media technology – as they acquire assets that come on the market at prices well below what they cost to build.

We’ll see fewer early-stage startups with intentions to create their own cultivated meat funded, and what investment dollars are left for this space will increasingly go to those building enabling technology to help accelerate the process. Over the past year, we’ve already seen more companies building pick-and-shovel technology like bioreactors, scaffolding, and growth media becoming the primary focus for investors.

Long term, the industry will need a combination of enough industry proof points and success stories to reassure investors they’ll get a return on their investment and to possibly convince the government to allocate significant resources. Unlike the electric vehicle industry, which saw mass-produced E.V.s start rolling off the production lines before President Obama pledged $2.4 billion in grants towards the industry, the cultivated meat industry is probably a decade away from mass-market production.

Still, hope shouldn’t be lost. The collective goal of these companies is too important to give up on, and while the era of easy capital is over, I think we’ll see some companies emerge from these tough times with products that will touch millions of consumers.

But the ride will definitely be bumpy.

TurtleTree Debuts Animal-Free Lactoferrin

TurtleTree, a biotechnology startup using precision fermentation to create bioactive ingredients such as animal-free milk proteins, has announced it will debut its precision-fermentation derived lactoferrin, which has the commercial name of LF+, tonight at a tasting event in San Francisco.

The bioactive milk protein, which the company says is nicknamed “pink gold” due to its high-cost and pink hue, is much sought after for its health benefits, including immunity, iron regulation, and digestive health support. However, conventional extraction techniques require massive amounts of cow’s milk – up to 10,000 liters, the equivalent of a week’s worth of milk production from nearly 50 cows – to obtain just 1 kilogram of purified lactoferrin. Because of this, traditionally derived lactoferrin costs anywhere between $700 to $1,500 per kilogram, which has been a gating factor in the broader adoption of this valuable protein.

By using precision fermentation, which uses microbes embedded with lactoferrin’s recipe to produce the protein, TurtleTree hopes to offer a more affordable and sustainably-derived form of lactoferrin to the market in LF+. If they are successful, the company may be one of the first startups launched in recent years to target proteins for infants (and beyond) using cellular agriculture to bring a scaled, revenue-generating product line to market. More broadly, the company may have also engineered an approach to make lactoferrin more widely available to consumers through a variety of products.

The move towards precision fermentation to produce functional proteins is a sign the company has evolved since it was founded in 2019. When The Spoon first interviewed the company, they focused primarily on using cell-cultivation methods to produce breast milk analogs. According to CTO Max Rye at the time, the company was using cell-cultivation techniques to grow mammary gland cells in a lab that would lactate milk. Company CEO Fengru Lin speculated early on that their first product would be human breast milk.

Fast forward to 2023, and the company has become more diversified in its approach to utilizing cellular agriculture techniques after bringing on some key hires skilled in the application of precision fermentation, a move that looks to have accelerated its path toward revenue with the commercialization of its animal-free lactoferrin. The company hopes to launch LF+ in the fourth quarter of this year.

You can watch the TurtleTree hero reel on their new product below:

Unlocking The Future of Nutrition with LF+, TurtleTree’s Unique Lactoferrin

Umami Meats Partners with TripleBar to Accelerate Cell Line Development for Cultivated Fish

Triplebar, a biotechnology company, and Umami Meats, a cultivated seafood company, have signed a letter of intent to collaborate on developing cell lines for sustainable cultivated seafood, starting with the Japanese eel according to a release sent to The Spoon.

Triplebar utilizes a microfluidics platform that it says can process thousands of complex assays per second with the noise characteristics of a liquid-handling robot. According to Triplebar CEO Maria Cho, these assays are processed using what she calls microreactors.

“The way to think about this is we take the test tube, and we miniaturize it to this very tiny microreactor that’s smaller than a human hair,” Cho told The Spoon. “And we’re able to put the thing that we want to test into this microreactor, and then the assay reagent that tests the thing that we’re looking for.”

With Umami, that “thing” they’ll be looking for is whether the cell line has the properties that it needs to grow in a bioreactor versus in an animal. That animal, in this case, is the eel, or unagi, a fish hugely popular in Japanese cuisine worldwide. Unfortunately, because of its popularity, unagi has become endangered due to overfishing. While much of the unagi sourced for human consumption is now produced via aquaculture, eel fish farms are incredibly inefficient due to the highly carnivorous nature of eels (researchers say it takes 2.5 tons of wild fish to make 1 ton of eel).

In describing how the Triplebar platform performs compared to traditional assay testing, Cho uses the analogy of the evolution of microprocessors. She says the company fits her microreactors on a chip that fits in the palm of your hand. That chip can process thousands of tests per second, millions per day, which she says is orders of magnitude more than tests run by humans or even liquid-handling robots. This increase is analogous to how a core-dense microprocessor performs compared to early computing technology.

In their partnership with Umami, Cho says they’ll look at how small changes to the genome produce the desired result in the cell line.

“We’re taking each of the individual base pairs in the genome and making a change in individual genomes,” said Cho. “And then, we’re oversampling that population to see what combination of changes give that final trait that we’re looking for which, in this case, are cells that grow in tanks versus animals.”

As for Umami, while its partnership with Triplebar will focus on eel, the company has plans to expand the collaboration to other types of fish. Umami says its “modular” production process works with various fish types, and the company says its platform will enable the manufacture of cultivated fish at different production sites tailored to local tastes. The company, which debuted its fish ball laksa last year in Singapore, says its product roadmap prioritizes endangered species that are IUCN Red Listed, particularly those that are unsuitable for large-scale aquaculture and face growing demand.

Belgian Precision Fermentation Specialist Paleo Raises €12m Series A

Belgian precision fermentation company Paleo has secured €12m in a Series A funding round the company announced today. The round was led by DSM Venturing and Planet A Ventures, alongside Gimv, SFPIM Relaunch, Beyond Impact, and Siddhi Capital.

According to the release, the funding will be used to scale up production of myoglobin, a protein that gives plant-based meat and fish alternatives what the company describes as a “real taste” experience. Myoglobin will be used by food manufacturers to create meat and fish alternatives.

“Paleo developed a technology to produce ingredients that lift these obstacles,” said Hermes Sanctorum, co-founder and CEO of Paleo. “Adding our ingredients to plant-based meat alternatives is a game changer that brings the experience of ‘real’ meat. You can smell it, you can taste it, and you can see it because our ingredients provide that vibrant red color that transforms into caramelized brown when you grill it. And no animal is involved whatsoever defining our ingredients as vegan.”

The company says the funding will be used to file for regulatory approval in certain markets and scale up production towards commercial production. The company says plant-based food with Paleo ingredients on the market by 2025.

“The food industry has barely scratched the surface of what is possible with precision fermentation, and Paleo will be at the forefront of this revolution in food production,” said Andy de Jong, co-founder and COO.

Precision fermentation continues to be the most resilient of the alternative protein segments over what is a dark time for many future food startups. The industry, which just saw the creation of its own industry consortium, has gained momentum in recent years as it has proven itself both incredibly flexible in terms of the ingredients it can produce, as well as scalable enough to produce ingredients for mass-market consumer products.

Miyoko’s Creamery Parts Ways With Namesake Founder, Sues for Stolen IP

Last week, it came to light that pioneering vegan cheese entrepreneur Miyoko Schinner had not only parted ways with her namesake company, but that the split between the founder and the company she started had turned acrimonious with Miyoko’s Creamery suing Schinner for stealing company information, including the formulations for some of the brand’s products.

The news of Schinner’s departure broke on Thursday when the company issued a press release. The release said the company and Schinner had “parted ways as the company enters a new stage of growth” and that they had engaged with an executive search firm to find a leader to take the company “into its next stage of growth.”

A day later, news broke that the company had filed suit in California, accusing the founder of stealing critical IP and intentionally disrupting company operations as she hatched a plan to start a competing company.

“Instead of facilitating an orderly transition, following her termination as CEO, Schinner hatched a plot to steal the Company’s property, trade secrets, and confidential information so that she could create a competing company,” Miyoko’s said in the complaint, according to legal reporting site Law360. The company went on to claim that Schinner had downloaded 24 thousand documents from the company’s cloud storage, taken cheese cultures and new product prototypes from Miyoko Creamery’s warehouse, and had recruited other employees of the company to participate in the “scheme.”

After the company broke the news of Schinner’s departure via a press release, Schinner responded on Linkedin and said her removal as CEO occurred in June of 2022 and that “negotiations for my continued involvement stalled before Christmas.”

And on Sunday, Schinner posted again on Linkedin, responding to the news of the lawsuit:

I am shocked that certain board members have decided to file a lawsuit against me. There are wild untruths about me that are designed to destroy me and get me out of the way. I have been cooperative with the Company since my termination.
 
I fail to see how this is adding value to the brand that I — and other values-driven, passionate vegan former employees — worked so hard to build.
 
While I am eager to bring the truth to light, I am going to move with the care necessary to ensure that I am operating in accordance with my fiduciary duties as a Director and with applicable legal rules and guidelines. (while I remain a Director, I am uncertain of how much sway or say I actually have). As always, I thank you for your trust, your patience, and your support.   

It is shocking to see the company sue its namesake founder, a high-profile entrepreneur and well-regarded industry pioneer. No doubt, the company knew it would suffer significant brand damage as news of the accusations spilled into public view, but apparently felt taking such drastic action was necessary.

We’ll keep following this story as it unfolds…

Nine Food Tech Startups Join Forces to Create the Precision Fermentation Alliance

Today nine companies in the precision fermentation industry have announced they have established the Precision Fermentation Alliance, a new trade organization aimed at promoting precision fermentation as a trusted solution for a more sustainable and resilient food system. The group says it will act as “an industry voice and global convener for the precision fermentation industry”, and ” champion precision fermentation as a trusted solution for a more resilient and sustainable food system.”

Precision fermentation uses microbes like fungi as hosts to produce functional ingredients like sugars and proteins, which often star as the key ingredients in flagship products companies like EVERY Company and Perfect Day, two founding members of the PFA. The technology has gained momentum in recent years as it has proven itself both incredibly flexible in terms of the ingredients it can produce, as well as scalable enough to produce ingredients for mass-market consumer products (like the heme in Impossible Foods’ plant-based meat).

According to the announcement, The Precision Fermentation Alliance has three major goals:

  • Promote understanding of precision fermentation technology. Establish global transparency around ingredients and foods made with precision fermentation to build trust and familiarity.
  • Educate and engage key stakeholders throughout the food industry value chain to establish best practices regarding regulatory, manufacturing, food safety, and communications standards and compliance.
  • Develop market access and the ability to operate and market products effectively by engaging with regulators. Unlock public funding and public-private partnerships to accelerate industry growth.

“There is a direct line between food production, climate, socioeconomic opportunities, and equity,” said Nicki Briggs, Chair of the Precision Fermentation Alliance and Vice President of Corporate Communications at Perfect Day.

“As we look to extend the use of this technology to produce an ever-expanding list of food ingredients, such as proteins and fats, we will be able to produce a wide variety of our most beloved foods animal-free, and with a much lower environmental footprint,” said Irina Gerry, Chief Marketing Officer, Change Foods and Vice Chair, Precision Fermentation Alliance. “Ushering in this new era in food requires clear communication, thoughtful policy, consistent regulation and stakeholder engagement, which this alliance is positioned to do.”

The founding members of the Precision Fermentation Alliance are Change Foods, The EVERY Co., Helaina, Imagindairy, Motif FoodWorks, New Culture, Onego Bio, Perfect Day, and Remilk.

Estonia’s ÄIO Raises €1 Million to Make Alternative Fats Out of Sawdust

Estonian start-up ÄIO has raised €1 million ($1.2 million) to develop alternative oils and fats for the food industry. The biotechnology firm, founded by TalTech bioengineers Petri-Jaan Lahtvee and Nemailla Bonturi last year, aims to replace environmentally depleting oils such as coconut and palm oils with sustainable, full-value alternatives.

ÄIO’s edible fats and oils are produced from agricultural and wood industry side-streams using processes derived from biotech research. The company’s proprietary production technique uses a fermentation process which the company says is similar to brewing beer or raising bread with yeast. During the fermentation process, the company uses what it calls a “red bug” microbe, created and patented by Bonturi. The result, according to ÄIO, is fats rich in healthy fatty acids and antioxidants.

“Our “red bug” cannot turn water into wine, but it can turn sawdust into food,” Bonturi said.

Nordic Foodtech VC, EAS, and other partners provided the funding. Mika Kukkurainen, partner and founder of Nordic Foodtech VC, said the global food industry is constantly searching for sustainable and healthy alternatives to palm oil and coconut oil. “Turning low-value side-streams into something so valuable is very futureproof and has great scalable business potential,” said Kukkurainen.

The company says it will use the funding to increase its production capacity, test products with the food industry, and apply for novel food permits to enter the European market. The company plans to begin industrial-scale production by 2026.

The news of ÄIO’s funding is the latest in an increasingly crowded field of startups looking to develop more sustainable fat alternatives for makers of alternative proteins. Last year CUBIQ raised €5.75 million, just a week after Melt&Marble announced they’d raised a €5 million Seed round to scale up production for its precision fermentation-derived fat alternative. In March, Lypid raised $4 million for its technology that microencapsulates plant oils in water to create spongy fats with high melting points. And last November,  Cultimate Foods announced it had raised a pre-seed €700 thousand to develop cultivated fat for hybrid alt-meat products.

Meala Raises $1.9M to Create Functional Proteins From ‘Home Kitchen’ Ingredients

Israel–based start-up Meala FoodTech announced today it has secured $1.9m in pre-seed funding from investors. The company, which is focused on developing functional proteins from what it says will be clean and recognizable ingredients, received funding from The Kitchen FoodTech Hub (part of the Strauss-Group), and DSM Venturing, the corporate venture arm of Royal DSM. The funding will be used to continue developing Meala’s functional protein platform and move it from lab to pilot scale.

The company’s focus is on developing functional proteins that can achieve the taste and mouthfeel of real meat but do so without a long and exotic-looking ingredient list. While the company doesn’t name names, it’s clearly contrasting the proteins developed with its cleaner-label ingredient platform with those used by companies such as Impossible and Beyond. But unlike those companies, Meala’s focus is B2B, where it will provide functional proteins for other CPG brands creating plant-based meats. In short, it’s hoping to be something akin to a clean-label version of Motif Foodworks.

“There is a significant need in the plant-based industry to effectively reduce undesirable ingredients and clean up labels,” said Hadar Razmovich, CEO and Meala co-founder. “This investment will help us get closer and faster to the market, better address the companies’ specific needs and provide affordable, smarter solutions.”

According to the company, its multi-functional proteins will improve the texture of meat alternatives and make them more realistic while also creating a “more full-bodied flavor” with what it describes as a short list of “home kitchen” ingredients. The company says its proteins will be designed to be used as “binding and gelling agents” with “superior water retention capabilities.” The start-up’s technology can be used to develop functional proteins for a variety of alternative meats, including burgers, sausages, nuggets with egg and fish.

The company plans to use the funding to further develop its platform technology and take it from lab to pilot scale and says it intends to have its products in the US and Europe by 2024.

The company’s positioning definitely feels of the moment, coming at a time when the plant-based industry is doing a bit of soul-searching regarding its approach of the last few years. That said, there’s not a whole lot of detail in the Meala announcement about what exactly its “home kitchen” ingredients will be, and without having tasted meats developed using its ingredients, it’s impossible to know just yet if they will achieve their intended goal. But if they can deliver on their promise to have the best of both worlds – a simple ingredient list and proteins that deliver realistic meat-like flavor – it’s not hard to imagine CPG brands lining up at their door.

Czech Startup Mewery Makes Cultivated Meat with Microalgae

Czech startup Mewery announced today they have created the world’s first cultivated meat prototype using microalgae according to a release sent to The Spoon. The company says it used a hybrid culture medium with microalgae extracts to create cultivated meat consisting of 75% pork and 25% microalgae cells.

Why microalgae? The company says there are several benefits to using the hard-working microorganisms, including eliminating FBS (Fetal Bovine Serum) as a cultivating medium. Mewery says its process also lowers costs and provides additional nutritional benefits, including additional vitamins, antioxidants, minerals, fiber, and essential fatty acids. The company also says its cultivated meat is one hundred percent cellular, contrasting with many prototypes that rely on soy or pea proteins.

Above: Roman Lauš and the Mewery team

Based in the Czech Republic, Mewery was founded by longtime entrepreneur and event producer Roman Lauš. After becoming interested in the nascent cultivated meat space while developing the agenda for the Future Port Prague event in 2018, Lauš eventually decided to create his own company. By 2020, he had assembled a team, and after a couple of years of research and development, they made the company’s first prototype. Now, Lauš and his team aim to have its first consumer-ready products – the first of which will be pork meatballs and pork sausage – on the market in two years.

To get there, the company is seeking additional funding this year to fund continued work on its biobank cell repository and the buildout of large-capacity bioreactors to scale volume.

“In this way, we want to ensure a more or less unlimited source of pig cells, which will move us closer to large-scale production,” said Lauš.