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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Biomanufacturing

Clara Foods Becomes The EVERY Company, Launches Animal-Free Egg Protein

Clara Foods, one of the early pioneers building nature-equivalent proteins using precision fermentation technology, announced today it is rebranding to the EVERY Company and is launching its first animal-free egg product called ClearEgg, an egg protein product targeted at the protein beverage market.

The new product, ClearEgg, will be sold through EVERY’s strategic partner Ingredion, a Chicago-based ingredient solutions conglomerate. EVERY describes ClearEGG as a product that “enables brands to add a nearly tasteless protein boost to hot and cold beverages, acidic juices, energy drinks, carbonated and clear beverages, as well as snacks and nutrition bars. Proteins by EVERY will support label claims including kosher, halal and animal-free.”

The rebrand is a familiar path many startups take as they transition out of an early company name which serves them well during the product development phase. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of Hampton Creek’s rebrand to Just (later Eat Just).

“Our new branding, EVERY, conveys our vision to fundamentally transform the food system for the 21st century so that every human, everywhere can enjoy the food they know and love without harming our planet or animals in the process,” said Arturo Elizondo, EVERY Company CEO.

The launch of ClearEgg is a big milestone for one of precision fermentation’s early pioneers. The company, which launched as part of IndieBio’s first cohort, has been working on creating an egg replacement since 2014 after cofounders Elizondo and Dave Anchel struck up a conversation at a conference. It wasn’t long after that first conversation before the two were working on their idea for using microbial fermentation to create eggs without the chicken.

The ClearEgg protein is just the first attempt by EVERY to crack the animal-free egg market. When I talked to Elizondo earlier this year on the Spoon podcast, he told me the eventual goal is to release a nature-equivalent egg white, diversify into other types of egg types outside of the chicken, and even create a platform that enables entirely new products.

“We’re truly entering the age of molecular food,” said Elizondo. “Not just molecular gastronomy, but instead how do we leverage the molecular element of it in producing the next generation of ingredients to build food 2.0 with new textures, new properties, new flavors that are not even possible to achieve right now with our current animals as a technology?”

A Cuppa Joe Grown in a Lab? That’s Right, Cell-Cultured Coffee Is Now a Reality

Cellular agriculture has given us hope about the future of sustainable meat production, but what about coffee? After all, many of us (this author included) would happily give up that great steak or burger to make sure we get that first cup of coffee in the morning.

Well good news, caffeine addicts: A research lab in Finland announced they have made coffee using cellular agriculture techniques. According to an article today in Phys.org, the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland “is developing coffee production through plant cells in its laboratory in Finland. In the process, cell cultures floating in bioreactors filled with nutrient medium are used to produce various animal- and plant-based products.”

The process by VTT includes establishing the cell lines in the lab and then transferring the cell cultures to a bioreactor where they produce biomass. Once harvested, the biomass is roasted into something resembling the coffee we purchase from the store.

“In terms of smell and taste, our trained sensory panel and analytical examination found the profile of the brew to bear similarity to ordinary coffee,” said VTT Research Team Leader Dr. Heiko Rischer. “However, coffee making is an art and involves iterative optimization under the supervision of specialists with dedicated equipment. Our work marks the basis for such work.”

While we’ve seen a few startups such as Atomo working on building “molecular” coffee, those approaches use upcycled plant-based ingredients with similar compounds to coffee beans. VTT’s research project is the first example we’ve seen of cellular agriculture techniques used to replicate coffee bean cells in a bioreactor.

Whether it’s cell-ag coffee beans or derived using molecular magic, discovering new approaches to create coffee is urgent given the state of traditional crop farming. Mega-producers like Brazil face severe droughts due to climate change, which has resulted in big jumps in coffee bean prices.

But don’t expect coffee from a bioreactor to show up on store shelves anytime soon. First, researchers must figure out how to scale the process, and regulatory approval would be needed.

You can see the full article on Phys.org here.

Unicorn Biotechnologies Is Making Purpose-Built Bioreactors for Cell-Based Meat Production

Jack Reid believes that the cell-based meat industry could move a lot faster if it just used manufacturing equipment made for the job.

According to the CEO of a new Cambridge-based startup called Unicorn Biotechnologies, companies trying to make meat without the animal today are mostly using large metal vats built for making something other than meat.

“Existing bioreactor systems haven’t been and weren’t developed specifically for the cell ag industry,” said Reid.

That’s right. In an industry where hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding has flowed into companies that are predicted to be someday worth billions of dollars, startups are using equipment ill-suited for the task at hand. Instead of using machines made to replicate animal cells at scale, these companies are using bioreactors optimized to create products already produced in large volumes and have established markets.

“We’re talking about large fermenting systems that are for brewing beer,” said Reid. “Or even pharmaceutical grade bioreactors that are designed for vaccine manufacturing and recombinant protein production.”

By using equipment that is not purpose-fit for replicating animal cells for cultured meat products, Reid thinks a massive amount of inefficiency and cost is added to the process. Pharma bioreactors don’t have the right sensors and are built to make a smaller amount of product at a much higher cost. Beer fermenters are built, well, to make beer. But the biggest problem in Reid’s mind is using systems that aren’t built for cell-based meat means you ultimately have unhappy cells.

“Most bioreactors have a long period optimization period where you have to figure out how to make the conditions just right to make the cells happy and to allow them to proliferate, differentiate and turn into the fat, muscle,” said Reid.

And making the cells happy is a challenge cell-based meat makers need to address at each phase of the process. This can mean optimizing the process on the research bench, during pilot production, and ultimately for fully scaled manufacturing.

If this sounds like a problem for an industry hoping to make enough product to account for a significant percentage of the overall meat market by the end of the decade, it is. But Reid and his co-founder Dr. Adam Glen think they have a solution: a modular manufacturing system built for cell-based meat production.

Why modular? Because as Reid describes it, with a modular bioreactor system, the transfer of the highly technical process for making a cell-based meat product would only need to happen once, from the lab bench to their bioreactor. After that, a company could scale up production by simply adding more modules.

“The path to scaling up your production capacity is going from one module to two, ten, one hundred, and so on until you reach your desired output.”

How would it all work? According to Reid, like a bunch of robots working together.

“A good parallel might be swarm robotics,” said Reid, who pointed to the example of robotic systems used in large grocery warehouses. “In those, we’re not looking at 100 different robots acting together. We’re looking at one system with 100 different ways to interact with the warehouse. That is the principle that underpins our technology and our modular system.”

By having a highly flexible system that can fit various sizes of producers, Reid thinks his systems could bring cell-based meat-making to a more widely distributed group of future meat manufacturers.

“We’d like it to be a reality where smaller manufacturing systems are a realistic possibility,” said Reid. “To bring to individual farms, to bring to communities, and really to spread the manufacturing of these products away from the highly centralized production model that has dominated protein manufacturing for the last few decades.”

But before all this happens, Reid and his team need to build the product and get it ready for manufacturing. The company, which took on a pre-seed funding round from SOSV/HAX and Entrepreneur First, is currently building its product prototype in the labs.

“Once we’ve hit a few more of our milestones, we’re looking to go out and do our next round of fundraising, scale up the team, and transform our prototype it into the first generation of our product.”

Formo Raises $50 Million to Make Animal-Free Cheese With Precision Fermentation

Berlin-based Formo announced today it had raised $50 million in Series A funding. The investment in the maker of animal-free cheese was led by EQT Ventures, with Elevat3 Capital and Lowercarbon Capital.

The company, which started out as Legendairy Foods but rebranded earlier this year, says it will use the new cash to build a pilot plant, fast-track commercial production, and expand its science team.

From the release:

“With the resulting increase in R&D capacity, Formo plans to expand its product portfolio to represent a wide variety of European dairy specialties such as mozzarella and ricotta, with techniques designed in collaboration with artisan cheesemakers.“

Formo uses a precision fermentation process to make animal-free dairy cheese with animal identical proteins. For cheese, this means first encoding DNA into microorganisms to produce casein and whey. From there, they feed the microbes until they produce enough protein, which is then harvested and combined with other ingredients to make cheese.

“Formo domesticates microorganisms instead of cows, using precision fermentation to create nature-identical dairy products. Formo’s cheeses have the same taste, texture, and functional properties as animal-derived cheeses, but come at a substantially lower cost for the environment, human health, and animal welfare. With microorganisms being up to 20 times more efficient than cows at converting feed into food, Formo can already undercut consumers’ willingness to pay at commercial production scale.“

The company says the $50 million is Europe’s largest series A food tech investment to date. This is true if we’re not counting restaurant tech (and Karma Kitchen’s $317 million series A), but no matter how you slice it, Formo’s latest is impressive and certainly the largest we’ve seen for a precision fermentation startup in Europe.

Future Meat Opens Production Facility, Aims to Sell Cultured Meat in the US by 2022

Future Meat has officially opened what it says is the world’s first production facility for cultured meat. The plant, located in the company’s hometown of Rehovot, Israel, is a big step in accelerating Future Meat’s timeline for getting regulatory approval to sell cultured meat and then actually getting products onto consumers’ plates.

Future Meat says the plant can produce 500 kilograms of cultured meat per day, which is equivalent to roughly 5,000 hamburgers. Those numbers may pale in comparison to traditional meat (this McDonald’s factory produces 5 million burgers every day), but for the extremely nascent cultured meat industry, they make for significant progress. 

Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientific officer of Future Meat Technologies, told The Spoon that the new facility is currently processing cultured chicken, pork, and lamb. Beef production will arrive soon. The company’s first official products to come out of the facility will be a cultured chicken breast, chicken fingers, and hamburgers. 

Earlier this year, Future Meat told The Spoon it has been able to decrease the cost of cultured meat production by 1,000x over the last three years. At last check, the company had brought the cost of its cultured chicken breast down to $7.50 USD per quarter-pound serving. It followed that up with news that the production price could drop to $2 within the next 12 to 18 months.

Future Meat’s end products will be a combination of cell-cultured and plant-based protein. Nahmias said that his company’s products are 45 to 75 percent cultured meat, with an edible scaffold made of plant protein. Cell-based protein will replace plant-based elements in future generations of product as the cost of cultured meat continues to decrease.

No technologies out there, he said, use 100 percent cultured meat. “Meat is composed of cells and a three-dimensional protein scaffold that holds the cells together. Companies are either adding the edible scaffold to the cells or adding the cells to the edible scaffold. It is pretty much the same.”

Importantly, Future Meat has also developed a serum-free growth medium for feeding cells. This allows the company to avoid using the controversial fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is both expensive and ethically controversial. According to Nahmias, Future Meat’s medium is made up of a mixture of amino acids, oils, glucose, and naturally occurring hormones. “Removing serum is a critics step in market realization of cultured meat,” he said. “Companies that fail to do that require the slaughter of dozens of calves to grow a single hamburger.” The company’s chicken, lamb, and pork cells are currently growing “in scale” without serum at the production facility.

Future Meat may be the first to open the doors on a production facility for cultured meat, but others won’t be long in coming. Bioprinting startup MeaTech 3D, also based in Israel, says it will have a production facility operational by 2022. San Francisco, California-based Wildtype also opened a production facility this week, though it is focused solely on cultured seafood at the moment and is therefore not a direct competitor to Future Meat. 

Down the line, Future Meat would like to open another production facility, ideally in the United States. For now, Future Meat is working to get regulatory approval here in the U.S., with the goal of selling its products in foodservice venues next year.

Motif FoodWorks Raises $226M to Improve the Taste of Plant-Based Proteins

Plant-based food tech company Motif FoodWorks has raised a whopping $226 million in Series B funding, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The round was co-led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, through its Teachers’ Innovation Platform, and BlackRock. Rethink Food and existing investors also participated in the round. To date, Motif has raised $345 million.

The company says its new funds will go towards three areas: research and development; scaling and commercializing its food tech; and expanding its number of people and facilities.

Through all of these areas, Motif’s underlying goal is to improve plant-based foods by developing novel food ingredients that lead to better texture, mouthfeel, and taste in products. The company does this via a mix of microbial engineering and precision fermentation.

Motif, which was spun out of bioengineering platform Ginkgo Bioworks, moved into its own facility in the Boston Seaport area last year, where it is focusing on R&D efforts. Meanwhile, just last month, the company announced it had acquired extrudable fat technology from private research firm Coasun to use in mimicking fat textures in plant-based meats. Additionally, Gingko is licensing prolamin technology from the University of Guelph. The prolamin tech will improve the texture of plant-based cheese so that it can melt, bubble, and stretch as easily as its traditional counterpart. 

This massive Series B fundraise comes at a time when retail sales of plant-based foods surpassed $7 billion. Even so, there’s room for improvement. Research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and Earth Day Network found that 44 percent of consumers surveyed “don’t like the taste of plant-based foods.” However, two out of three said in the same research that they would be “willing to eat more plant-based foods instead of meat if plant-based foods tasted better than they do today.”

Fermentation technology, sometimes called “the third pillar” of alt protein, is a way to bridge the taste gap between traditional and plant-based meats. Ingredients made with biomass and/or precision fermentation can be combined with plant-based ingredients to achieve the kind of meat and dairy analogues that taste and feel as close to the real thing as possible.

Other companies, including Perfect Day, Change Foods, and Clara Foods are all working towards this goal, too.

Animal-Free Dairy Startup Change Foods Closes $2.1M Seed Round

Change Foods, a startup best known at this point for making animal-free cheese via a fermentation process, has closed an oversubscribed Seed round of $2.1 million. Investors include Plug and Play Ventures, Clear Current Capital, Canaccord Genuity, Better Bite Ventures, Jeff Dean, and GERBER-RAUTH, among others. To date, Change Foods has raised $3.1 million in funding, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The company, founded in 2019, has up to now been split between Palo Alto, California and Melbourne, Australia. In the wake of this new funding, Change Foods is setting up a new R&D facility in the San Francisco Bay Area and company founder David Bucca has already relocated there.   

The company plans to bring its first product — animal-free cheese — to market in 2023.

Precision fermentation is one method within the larger fermentation category. For Change Foods, involves fermenting microorganisms such as yeast or filamentous fungi with sugar to produce the cells for specific functional ingredients — fats, vitamins, flavoring agents, and enzymes, to name a few. (Precision fermentation is also used to create insulin.) Perfect Day and Impossible Foods are examples of major alt-protein companies that use this process to get their products.

An animal-free cheese made via this method has the potential to be one of the first animal-free cheeses to appeal to the non-vegan crowd. Up to now, numerous companies have tried their hand at plant-based cheeses. Few have gotten the flavor and texture close enough to the real thing to win over masses of consumers. Motif Foodworks, the food tech spinout of synthetic biology company Gingko Bioworks, is the other notable company developing cheese products through precision fermentation. 

Traditional cheese requires a significant amount of land and water to produce, puts it right up there with meat in terms of food items consumers should ideally cut back on or find outright replacements. To realistically counter that, alternatives will have to taste less like cashew or legumes and more like actual cheese. Precision fermentation may eventually be a highly efficient way to do this at scale, hence new investments like this one now going towards the space.

Transcript: Excerpts From a Recent Conversation With Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick

By “in the future,” he didn’t mean next year. Anyone who keeps an eye on the cultivated meat industry knows there are many, many hurdles to leap before we’re eating cultivated Big Macs. For companies actually making the products and/or accompanying technologies, there’s still much to do around improving growth media, bioprocess design, and many other things. And, of course, more companies must get regulatory approval to sell in more countries.

Nonetheless, the aforementioned shift towards cultivated meat is happening. Restaurants are a major part of that process, as is the task of educating consumers about what cultivated meat actually is (“It doesn’t taste like meat. It is meat”) and why the heck we need it in the first place.

Spoon Plus subscribers can read the transcript of my conversation with Tetrick below. And if you missed our weekly newsletter discussing the topic, go here to read the web version of it.

Delivery Has a Small But Vital Role When it Comes to Normalizing Cultivated Meat

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Setting aside scalability, price parity, and regulatory approvals for a moment, one of the major challenges for cultivated meat makers will be getting people to actually buy their products en masse and on a regular basis.

We’ve written before about restaurants being a critical step in this journey, and after this week, I would add restaurant delivery to that process, too. The industry-wide shift to delivery wrought by the pandemic forced the restaurant biz to get pretty creative in terms of what it can do with delivery. Similar energy could be put towards delivering consumers an entire education about cultivated meat, not just a meal in a box.

There’s currently only one company in the world that’s even allowed to sell cultivated meat in restaurants right now — Eat Just, which nabbed the first-ever regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat at the end of 2020 and subsequently started selling its GOOD chicken product at Singapore restaurant 1880. The San Francisco-based Eat Just has since struck a deal with Delivery Hero’s food panda service to deliver meals from 1880. This week, Eat Just announced (among other things) that it is doing something similar with JW Marriott Singapore South Beach’s Madame Fan restaurant. To start, GOOD chicken dishes will only be available from Madame Fan with delivery orders.

When I talked to Eat Just’s CEO Josh Tetrick this past week, he was admittedly a little more blasé about delivery than I’m being at the moment: “It just was kind of as simple as, ‘It’d be nice if people could eat meat without slaughter in their homes. So let’s do delivery.'” Delivery Hero happens to be an investor in Eat Just, and food panda happens to be one of Asia’s biggest delivery services. Those convenient factors made delivery something of a no-brainer for the company to pursue.

But Tetrick also pointed out that delivery is part of the overall process of getting cultivated meat out of the lab and onto our plates. “Start with regulatory approval,” he said. “Then it’s getting on a menu. Then it’s having a family sit down and have a chicken dinner together. Then you can go to a retailer and buy [it]. All these things create a context in which this idea of making meat — which seemed like it was some futuristic thing a year ago — suddenly becomes a way that people just eat meat.”

Restaurants have historically played a role in the evolution of what we eat. But thanks to the forces at work, both technological and pandemic-related, restaurants are no longer just in-person experiences between the four walls of a dining room. If there was one idea that’s been dissected ad infinitum over the last year, it’s that the word “restaurant” now encompasses a far wider range of experiences. One of the biggest is delivery.

The pandemic accelerated rather than created delivery’s popularity, which means as a meal format, it won’t go by the wayside anytime soon. Numbers may taper off a bit as the world reopens, but many consumers have already said they will continue to order delivery on a regular basis. That makes it an integral part of the restaurant industry that anyone looking to enter the biz needs to pay attention to. Like cultivated meat companies.

If we go by the example Eat Just/GOOD have set, that involves more than putting some lab-grown chicken bites in a cardboard box. Tetrick said that delivery for the Madam Fan deal will operate similar to what his company did with its original 1880/food panda deal. Customers can choose from a few different dishes (chicken and rice, katsu curry, etc.). Meals are delivered to customers along with a Google Cardboard viewer and a link to a 360-degree short film about meat. Tetrick described the film as follows:

“You you put the glasses on and you’re in the midst of a rain forest in South America. Then it transitions to the rain forests being removed, and you see that it’s connected to planting lots of soy and corn. And you see how the soy and corn is connected to feed going to animals, and you see how that’s connected to your plate and how we could do something different.”

The point is to help consumers familiarize themselves with the term “cultivated meat” and explain why it matters for the health of the plant (more food made with fewer resources) and how that big-picture context fits into each individual consumer’s life, whether they’re in Singapore or Tennessee.

Longer term, immersive experiences like the above could help with what’s something of an end game for cultivated meat: getting people to think of it as just meat. Not “lab-grown meat” or “slaughter-free” meat or any of the other descriptors floating around nowadays. Just regular ol’ meat from regular ol’ animals.

It’s significant, then, that Eat Just’s deal with Madame Fan will deliver cultivated meat that actually replaces its conventional counterpart on the menu. In future, says Tetrick, restaurant menus will still offer some plant-based options (for those who can’t eat animals for ethical and/or religious reasons). But in his mind, “it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have both cultivated meat and conventional meat on the menu.”

“I think you’ll end up having restaurants all across the world transition,” he added.

Not tomorrow, mind you. As I write this, global demand for meat is up. There is also a huge difference between letting someone taste something as a one-off experience and getting them to order it on a regular basis. As more companies attempt to scale up — often to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — they will need to start educating their prospective consumers on what the heck this stuff is and why we need it in the first place. Choosing the right restaurant partners and getting the actual chefs involved will be important for this, too, as well sending the right messaging to each different demographic.

Food delivery may be one small step in this process, but given its ubiquity right now, it’s a crucial one to get right.

Elsewhere in the Restaurant Biz . . .

Top Three Takeaways from Our Food Robotics Summit – The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht gives some thought to the future of robots, including restaurant robots, in his wrap-up from our latest event.

Take on Big Pizza by Supporting Bitcoin – An investor/entrepreneur has launched Bitcoin Pizza, a pop-up restaurant brand that will partner with independent pizza shops to deliver pies from May 22–29. Proceeds in part go towards supporting independent restaurants.

On-Demand Pay App DailyPay Raises $500M in Capital – The on-demand payment service for restaurants and retailers has secured $500 million in capital and will use it to expand to new markets.

A Spanish Dairy Company Has Launched a Startup Incubator to Help Cultured Milk Companies

Pascual Innoventures, the open innovation arm of Spanish dairy company Calidad Pascual, has launched what it says is the world’s first incubator program for cellular agriculture in the dairy industry. Dubbed Mylkubator, the program will select and work with startups hoping to change the dairy industry through the development of alternative proteins. 

The program, which is supported by investment network Eatable Adventures and technology partner CNTA, will choose up to 10 startups to join the six-month hybrid program. Either in-person or virtually (or both), companies will work with mentors and get access to Pascual’s R&D facilities to develop and test their products. 

On a high level, cultured milk is created by growing mammary gland cells in an external environment (like a bioreactor) that mimics the one found inside mammals (like a cow). Micronutrients get converted into milk, which can then be harvested and purified. The process requires expertise in a number of different areas, from cell-growth media to machine learning modules that can optimize the production process. Different types of milk, including cow’s milk and human breastmilk, can be made from this process.

To that end, novel growth media, cell-growth techniques, and improvement of cell lines are among the topics the program says it is looking to find companies. And in addition to cellular ag, startups working with fermentation-based solutions or developing applied technologies like machine learning and biorecators are also welcome to apply. 

In the realm of alternative protein, the number of well-known companies currently developing milk analogues via cellular agriculture is still pretty small, particularly in comparison to the glut of cell-based meat makers. Turtle Tree Labs and Biomilq are the most well-known companies at this point.

On the other hand, companies like Perfect Day and ReMilk make milk analogues via fermentation, a process now seen as the third-pillar of alternative protein.  

Startups working with both methods are invited to apply for Mylkubator’s program. Those chosen will get a chance to prototype, test and scale their products, in addition to meeting with mentors and potential investors. The application process is open now.

Mosa Meat Achieves an ‘Over 65x Reduction’ in Costs for Its Cultured Fat

Dutch cultured protein company Mosa Meat said over the weekend it has reduced the cost of its fat media by 66 times thanks to the work of a group the company refers to as its Fat Team. Without listing actual price numbers, Mosa Meat said its fat medium now costs 1.52 percent of what it did less than two years ago, in September of 2019.

In the cultivated meat-making process, the nutrient-rich growth medium fed to cells triggers those cells to grow into muscle, fat, and tissue, all of which are put together to create a final end product. A company might grow fat cells for use in its own meat analogues, or it could sell the fat as an ingredient to other businesses. Fat is also a crucial component in achieving a “meatier” taste, texture, and mouthfeel when it comes to cultured protein.  

Mosa Meat, of course, is well known as the company that created the world’s first cultivated hamburger back in 2013 — for a cool $325,000. A huge part of this cost was (and still is for many) the growth medium, which at the time was made using fetal bovine serum (FBS). FBS is as expensive as it is controversial. As the Good Food Institute puts it, “The use of animal-derived components in cultivated meat production has prohibitive economic, food safety, and ethical constraints.”

In July of last year, Mosa Meat said it had achieved a more than 80x cost reduction for its growth media, a milestone largely driven by the company’s ability to develop FBS-free media. The company now uses an “animal component free” media that is part of the reason the Fat Team was able to announce its own cost reductions recently.

“We’ve definitely checked yet another box on our journey towards a product that meets the expectations of critical meat lovers,” company cofounder Peter Verstrate said in this weekend’s announcement. 

Mosa Meat’s announcement comes not long after MeaTech 3D, an Israeli company, said it would produce cultivated fat at a new pilot production facility. Additionally, last month Mission Barns raised $24 million to build up a production facility in San Francisco for its cultivated fat business. Meanwhile, multiple companies, from Avant Meats to Future Meat, have announced price slashes in production costs over the last several months.

Lowering costs, whether of fat, medium, or other components, will help the entire cultured meat industry get products closer to price parity with their traditional counterparts. Price parity is only of many other milestones that have to be achieved in order to make cultivated meat a commercial reality. However, it is seen by many as an extremely crucial step in the process. 

Mosa Meat doesn’t yet have a timeframe for when it might have burgers in front of customers, or how much they’ll cost once that happens. At last check, the company was working with European regulators to get approval for its products. 

A Mid-Year Assessment for Alternative Protein

More companies, more investments, and many more scientific breakthroughs. Those are just a few predictions for the future of alternative protein the Good Food Institute (GFI) sets out in its latest State of Industry reports. Three different papers — one each on plant-based protein, fermentation, and cultivated protein — go in-depth into the trends that drove alternative protein in 2020 and what we can expect for the rest of 2021.

As we’ve written before, investment in alternative protein topped $3.1 billion in 2020, which is more than three times the amount raised by the sector in 2019. Driving those investments are, says GFI, numerous developments across the commercial landscape, investments, scientific and technological developments, and regulatory and government activity.

The State of Industry reports cover the obvious developments, such as the world’s first sale of cultivated meat and plant-based meat’s $7 billion in retail sales. But more interesting now is what we can expect in the future — that is, for the remainder of 2021 and on into the next few years. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of those developments:

Expect lots more pilot production environments for cultivated meat. Reaching pilot scale could be seen as the step that bridges a company’s proof-of-concept phase with its commercial phase. GFI notes that at this stage, companies would be producing “hundreds or thousands” of metric tons of cultured meat. (Millions would be required for a company to scale to an industrial level.) Reaching pilot scale would mean being able to supply “a limited number of high-end restaurants in the coming one to three years.” (Read more on why restaurants are critical to cultivated meat’s growth.)

As GFI points out, multiple companies are now transitioning into this pilot-scale phase, including BlueNalu, MosaMeat, and SuperMeat. The latter even turned its pilot production site (pictured above) into a restaurant where consumers can taste the company’s cultured chicken in exchange for leaving detailed feedback. Elsewhere, Aleph Farms and MeaTech 3D plan to have facilities running by 2022 and Avant Meats recently announced a pilot production facility for Singapore. UPSIDE Foods, formerly Memphis Meats, has also just broken ground on a facility.

Cellular agriculture will become its own field of study. One PhD candidate at Tufts University noted that we can expect cell ag to get its own degree program at universities, and have a “separate and distinct curriculum.”

Fermentation production will increase. “If we believe in the projection of 25%-30% CAGR, then for fermentation to even maintain its share of the market, there is a need for a 10x+ increase in capacity by 2030,” Jim Laird of 3F Bio states in GFI’s fermentation report. Of course, needing to increase and actually doing it are two different things, but one of the advantages of fermentation is that it is already seen as a ost-competitive, scalable, and validated process. Many, including the GFI, have begun calling it the “third pillar of alt protein.”

Meanwhile, a number of companies, including Solar Biotech, MycoTechnology, and Nature’s Fynd are developing technologies and processes that will make fermentation even more cost-effective, which could in turn increase companies’ ability to produce.

Fermentation could “revolutionize” the entire alt-protein landscape. It has the potential to influence other areas of alternative protein. As GFI’s report notes, “Fermentation can enable a new generation of proteins, fats, and other functional ingredients that combine with plant-based and cultivated components to create biomimicking whole-cut meats, egg replacements, animal-free dairy proteins, seafood products, and more.” 

Along those lines, the next few years could see hybrid blends of meat, where fermentation-derived protein could also include plant and animal cell components. Fermentation is also already part of a number of other “alt” products besides meat, including cheese and bee honey.

More restaurants will go plant-based. We’ve been mulling the future of the plant-based restaurant for a while. Now that the world is beginning to come out of its various stages of lockdown and people are returning to dining rooms, there’s an enormous opportunity for plant-based foods to take center stage at restaurants. More restaurants will move to full plant-based menus, such as those seen from Canada-based Copper Branch and, most recently, Eleven Madison Park in NYC.

Plant-based chicken will be a big part of this shift. Right now there’s a distinct lack of choices, both in restaurants and grocery stores, when it comes to poultry. Expect this to change rapidly, starting with restaurants. 

This is by no means an exhaustive list. It is also important to keep in mind the many challenges the alt-protein sector still has to face, from improving the taste and texture of plant-based meat to bringing down the cost of cell-culture media. There are also heaps of regulatory approvals to be obtained before many of these companies and solutions can actually reach consumers.

Some of these challenges will be solved in 2021; others are years away from solutions. But if there’s one overarching takeaway we can glean from GFI’s report trio, it’s that everything — from number of companies to production levels to investment dollars — is going to increase astronomically this year for alternative protein.

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Memphis Meats Rebrands as UPSIDE Foods, Announces Cultured Chicken Product – The company rebranded and also announced that its first consumer product, cultured chicken, will be available to customers this year, pending regulatory approval.

Solar Biotech Raises $2M for Its Fermentation Tech – The Raleigh, North Carolina-based startup will use the $2 million in a debt-financing round to scale up its renewable-energy-powered fermentation technology, which it licenses to other companies.