Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cellular Agriculture

Vow Gets Greenlight in Australia As It Hits 1,200 Pounds Per Week of Cultivated Quail Meat

Vow, the Australian-based startup making foie gras and parfait from the cultivated cells of Japanese quail, announced a couple of big milestones this week, including what it claims to be the biggest ever production run of cultivated meat after harvesting 1,200 pounds of Japanese quail in a single week. This milestone was achieved using the company’s custom-designed 20,000-liter vessel designed entirely in-house.

This news comes the same week the Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) officially approved Vow’s application to add cultivated quail to the Food Standards Code. The final step is a 60-day review period by ministers from each jurisdiction within Australia and New Zealand. If no objections are raised, Vow could begin selling its cultivated quail products across ANZ as early as June.

According to CEO George Peppou, the secret to Vow’s rapid progress isn’t just about bigger tanks—it’s about rebuilding the entire factory model from scratch.

“Pharma infrastructure just doesn’t work for food,” Peppou told me in a recent episode of The Spoon Podcast. “We designed our second factory using a completely vertically integrated approach—engineers, welders, software, everything in-house—and built it for a fraction of what others have spent.”

Vow believes its new plant can make cultivated meat at a cost that is 20-50 times cheaper than its competitors, and now Peppou says that the company is now being approached by others as a potential manufacturing partner who see their approach as one that could scale.

“We’ve seen this sort of interesting uptick recently of other companies approaching us to ask about contract manufacturing. We’ve got the capacity. We’re selling continuously and we do have some excess capacity that we can provide to other companies. So we’ve got a few projects underway at the moment, which has been a very interesting insight into how other philosophies have played out.”

You can listen to my full conversation below.

A New Approach to Cultivated Meat with Vow's George Peppou

Givaudan, Bühler Group, and Migros Open Doors to The Cultured Hub, a Scale-Up Facility for Cellular Agriculture

Three years after announcing a joint venture, Givaudan, Bühler Group, and Migros have finally opened the doors to The Cultured Hub, a cutting-edge biotech facility dedicated to cellular agriculture production in Kemptthal, Switzerland. Initially introduced in 2021 as the Cultured Food Innovation Hub with the stated mission of accelerating the development and market penetration of cellular agriculture products, the facility now boasts advanced product development labs as well as cell culture and bio-fermentation capabilities.

According to the announcement, the new facility will enable startups to scale up their processes from small-scale laboratory experiments (e.g., shake flasks) to 1,000-liter pilot operations without requiring expensive asset investments or equity dilution. The organization says the facility will allow emerging companies to access subject-matter experts and resources to “create regulatory batches with analysis and food safety procedures, test new products, work on optimizing processes, and conduct small market launches.”

In some ways, the new facility is reminiscent of MISTA, the San Francisco-based innovation hub resulting from a partnership between Givaudan and Bühler. However, unlike MISTA, which features facilities such as a biotech lab and an extrusion hub, The Cultured Hub’s infrastructure is specifically focused on cellular agriculture production for products such as cultivated beef, fish, dairy, and more.

“The Cultured Hub is designed to bridge the scale-up gap for companies, enabling them to retain equity, protect intellectual property, and fast-track their journey to market without high capital investment,” said Ian Roberts, Chief Technology Officer of Bühler Group. “We are thrilled to bring together industry players and create a collaborative environment that will drive significant advancements in the industry.”

The rise of shared-access facilities for piloting new cell-ag food products makes sense in today’s capital-constrained environment. Venture capital investment in cultivated food startups has slowed over the past couple of years, particularly as capital requirements have risen with many of these companies entering the scale-up phase. At the same time, it remains uncertain whether many of these products will ever reach the commodity price points required to make them viable replacements for traditional animal agriculture.

Notable companies participating in The Cultured Hub’s community include Ever After Foods, GOURMEY, Mosa Meat, Nestlé, Nutreco, and Orbillion Bio.

Podcast: Can You Grow Meat With Light?

Cultivated meat companies have struggled over the past year as they try to figure out how to do something that’s never been done before: grow meat in large quantities in big metal vats.

Part of the challenge is figuring out how to grow the meat cells. The technology to do this has been borrowed from the pharmaceutical industry, where a single dose of a cancer drug can be sold for thousands of dollars. Needless to say, those cost dynamics don’t work when you’re making a chicken sandwich.

Deniz Kent thinks he has the answer. His company, Prolific Machines, is replacing expensive growth media with the cheapest energy input: light.

Listen to this conversation to hear how Deniz learned about how light could be a way to grow cells, why he thinks lights could help save the cultivated meat industry, and where he sees the cultivated meat industry going over the next decade.

You can listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or by clicking play below.

Florida Bill Banning Cultivated Meat On Its Way to DeSantis’ Desk

Selling cultivated meat in Florida is about to become a second-degree misdemeanor.

That’s because this week, the Florida legislature voted to pass a bill restricting the commercial sale of meat grown using cellular agriculture. The bill (SB 1084), which passed with a vote count of 86 Yays to 27 Nays, now heads to the desk of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to be signed into law. This was just days after the companion bill passed in the Florida Senate on February 29th.

The bill, which bans commercial distribution of cultivated meat but allows for continued research, is backed mainly by the conventional meat industry, which found willing and happy fellow travelers on this legislative journey in the form of culture-warrior politicians like Jacksonville Republican congressman and cattle rancher Dean Black.

“I think they can make it on the Moon and export it on Mars, and it’s fine to have Martian meat as well,” Black said. “If you go to the Moon, if you go to Mars, you should be allowed to get it there. But you sure as heck shouldn’t be able to get it anywhere in this country, and sure as heck not here in Florida.”

Black’s weird Florida-man-ish quote about Martian meat, which sounds like something out of a Carl Hiassen novel, refers to the exception allowed in the bill for continued research on cultivated meat because NASA and others are researching cultivated meat as a method for astronauts on long-term space missions.

The Florida ban, the first in the US, follows a similar ban in Italy passed last year. The Italian ban was championed by a far-right Italian agriculture minister in Francesco Lollobrigida, who said that the move would help protect jobs and Italian consumers from the invasion of what he described as “synthetic” food.

“We are safeguarding our food, our system of nutrition, by maintaining the relationship between food, land and human labour that we have enjoyed for millennia,” Lollobrigida said.

In both cases, the cattle lobby in each country was the driving force pushing for bans.

In the US, the Florida bill is similar to other legislation making its way through state legislatures in Arizona, Tennesee, and West Virginia. All of it concerns an industry that, at least to this point, is commercially non-existent, with the exception of sales at a couple of high-end restaurants.

While the impact is small today, those building these products are worried about the impact of these laws on cultivated meat as the industry matures.

“I’ve got more than enough challenges,” Wild Type CEO Justin Kolbeck said. “I don’t also need Florida to ban it to make the market smaller.”

Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Daphna Heffetz, CEO of Wanda Fish

Daphna Heffetz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Wanda Fish, a cellular agriculture company aimed at producing cell-based fish meat, starting with bluefin tuna. We talked about making cell-based fish entirely out of plant materials, the problems our oceans face today, and why Wanda Fish will only sell to high end restaurants to start. 

J: Tell me about your background and how you came to be the CEO and co-founder of Wandafish. 

D: I have been around for a long time in the biotechnology industry but focusing on life sciences. Almost two years ago, the Kitchen Hub approached me and tried to interest me in establishing Wanda Fish. I didn’t know enough about the issues of the ocean at that time, so I started to read and speak to several people. 

J: Can you tell me more about what Wanda Fish does and what makes it unique from other cell-based fish products? 

D: What we are doing is a variety of cultivated fish filets. Our strategy is to have a premium product that originates from the top fish species like bluefin tuna and yellowtail. We produce a whole-cut fish filet consisting of muscle and fat cells and make it similar to the fish itself by taking all the elements from the fish itself. We first take a one-time single sample of the fish tissue and never go back to the fish. We separate required cells, mainly muscle, and fat, which compose the fish filet and grow them in the same manner they would grow in the fish body. We are doing it in the lab initially and later on in a hygienic manufacturing facility in a bioreactor. All the elements are plant-based, no animal is used as the animal components are replaced with plant-based ones. We don’t add any supplements or additives because all the cells are taken from the fish and have the elements from the fish itself. 

J: What is the significance of the problem that Wanda Fish solves? 

D: The reason it’s so needed is because the population of the world is growing so rapidly. Also, the ocean is becoming very much polluted and 80% of its pollution is manmade. Also, there is unregulated fishing which is causing many types of fish to be endangered. More than 70% of the oxygen we all breathe is from the ocean. 

J: What stage is Wanda Fish currently at? 

D: It is already in the lab stage but in process development and gradual scaling. We are working with tabletop bioreactors that have all the elements of big bioreactors. 

J: Who are the ultimate customers? 

D: The product at the beginning will be served to restaurants. However, at the next stage, it will be sold in retail and you can get it in the supermarket. 

J: What is the reason for this strategy? 

D: More companies that are more advanced in us that started in 2017 or 2018 are also looking to sell to restaurants. One of the reasons for that is that it’s like a clinical study, you are selling to people, and you get feedback. Also, this helps spread branding. And most of all, in restaurants, the selling price is higher. Even before having price parity, you can sell to restaurants without losing money because the price point is much higher. 

J: Is there a specific type of restaurant that you are selling to? 

D: Because we are focusing on the top fish species, we are looking to start in high-end restaurants. This will be everywhere, hopefully in Asia and Japan and in the U.S. and Israel. We are going to do sales in countries based on the economic and regulatory situation. 

J: What are the challenges of adapting to sell in different markets? 

D: Unique market education. Because we won’t be the first in the market since there are a couple of companies ahead of us, still in production, market education will be minimal when we enter the market. In principle, there are some voluntary organizations, like GFI, that have done market and consumer research on the consumer world already. Through them, we have ideas of market acceptance. 

J: What do the next few years look like for you, and what are the goals that you are trying to hit? 

D: We are progressing with bluefin tuna as our first product and gradually scaling up with cost reduction and price parity. This can be done by increasing the density of cells in the bioreactors, lower-cost ingredients, and recycling of the medium. We are starting the regulatory process in several territories and hoping to collaborate with big international food suppliers. 

J: When do you think you’ll be ready for market? 

D: This will take a couple of years, but the goal is to be in the market in 2026.

Cultivated Meat is On Sale, But It’s Pricey. A New Study Shows How to Bring the Cost Down

Now that the cultivated meat industry has achieved the long-awaited milestone of going on sale to consumers in the US, the focus will increasingly turn to whether it’s possible to make meat outside the animal more affordably. After all, it’s cool to make meat using a process that sounds straight out of pages of a science fiction novel, but most of us can’t afford to dine in restaurants run by some of the world’s most famous chefs.

So how do we go from prices that rival the world’s most expensive cuts of meat to a more approachable price per pound? According to a new techno-economic analysis (TEA) from bioreactor startup Ark Biotech, using current methods – in other words, with technology and processes primarily developed by a pharmaceutical industry where drugs can cost thousands of dollars per ounce – we can get to about $29.5 per pound for cultivated meat. That’s (kind of) progress, but when you consider that’s what you’d pay for a pound of filet mignon at a butcher, it’s clear that that price per cut will not cut it.

To navigate from filet mignon prices to something closer to that of ground chuck, Ark outlines four ways to do that in the analysis:

  1. Reduce the cost of media
  2. Improve biomass yields
  3. Optimize the bioprocess
  4. Reduce capital spend (depreciation), primarily through larger bioreactors

The TEA breaks down how much each lever currently contributes via the legacy production process:

From there, they analyze how to cost-optimize the price along all four cost levers:

Reduce the Cost of Media

Media is the most significant cost driver today. Ark believes that the price can be reduced by “decreasing media production costs (e.g., procurement, recipe), and (2) increasing the cell mass per unit of media (growing more meat with the same amount of media).” They also explore further cost reductions through other methods, including recycling media and developing ‘fit for purpose recipes’.

Improving Cell Mass

Increasing the cell density and growing more mass per liter of input is another way to decrease the overall cost per pound or, in other words, improve the overall production yield. Ark’s analysis goes into significant technical detail on how to do so, including by optimizing cell lines naturally or through genetic modification.

Optimizing the bioprocess

Another significant lever to reduce the overall cost of cultivated meat is to optimize the bio-production process, which means selecting the optimal mode in which nutrients are supplied to the cells in the bioreactor. According to Ark, there are four primary methods for providing nutrients to cells in the bioreactor (batch, fed-batch, perfusion, and continuous), and the choice of the technique involves tradeoffs in capital expense vs. ongoing cost of goods sold.

Bigger Bioreactors

The most significant capital expense in cultivated meat production is the bioreactor, those giant metal vats which grow cultivated meat. While larger bioreactors have larger price tags, the capital cost per unit of cultivated meat decreases as production volume increases. Factoring in that the costs of running a bioreactor are largely fixed, the short-short is that bigger bioreactors mean lower prices per pound of meat produced.

The analysis concludes that to get to pricing that approaches the commodified price of traditional ground beef, a combination of improvements (i.e., lever adjustments) is needed. Exhibit 1 shows how much progress each lever will contribute to reducing the cost per pound of cultivated meat.

It goes without saying that Ark has a significant amount of self-interest in arriving at these conclusions. Still, from what I can see, the analysis is a reasonably thoughtful assessment of what drives the costs of cultivated meat and where the industry needs to go to lower the price per pound.

Of course, they go into much greater detail in the full report, so I’d suggest those interested check it out.

Alt Protein Enters New Era as USDA Approves Sale of Cultivated Chicken By UPSIDE & GOOD Meat

Today marks a big day for cultivated meat as two companies, UPSIDE Foods and Good Meat, announced today that they had received approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to sell their cultivated meat products to consumers.

According to UPSIDE, the news came in the form of notification from the USDA that they have received a “grant of inspection” (GOI) from USDA, which means the company has met the applicable federal requirements and standards to operate as a meat establishment and is allowed to process, package, and sell our cultivated chicken in the United States under the inspection of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

UPSIDE says that with this news, they have passed all three of the requisite milestones necessary to sell its meat – 1) “No Questions” Letter from FDA — November 2022, 2) USDA Label Approval — June 2023, and 3) today’s GOI notification.

With the latest news, the company says they are starting manufacturing of meat and scaling up production at their EPIC facility. They plan to start selling the meat soon at San Francisco’s Bar Crenn through their partnership with 3-Michelin Star chef Dominique Crenn.

Not to be outdone, GOOD Meat – the cultivated meat division of Eat Just – plans to sell its first cultivated meat in the U.S. through a partnership with Chef José Andrés. According to the company, the sale of their cultivated meat product was greenlighted with the news that the USDA has given the company approval for its first poultry product to enter interstate commerce in the U.S. According to GOOD Meat, the sale of its product will take place at a yet-to-be-disclosed restaurant in Washington, D.C.

For GOOD Meat, the news marks the second country approval for the company will begin selling its cultivated meat product. The company achieved a global first in late 2020 by selling its cultivated chicken in Singapore.

Today’s news is truly a watershed event for the alt protein space. After billions of dollars spent across the industry for research and development, commercialization, and production, we will finally see the first cultivated products sold to U.S. consumers.

However, despite today’s news, everyday consumers may still have a bit of a wait. Cultivated meat products are still being made in small quantities and will first be sold in the most exclusive of restaurants, and it might be a while before we see it at the corner grocery store.

Extracellular To Offer License-Free & Low-Cost Cell Banks for Cultivated Meat Startups in the UK

Today Extracellular, a cultivated meat-focused contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), announced the availability of low-cost and license-free cell banks for research to cultivated meat developers in the UK. The banks of primary cells will be made available to early-stage cultivated meat researchers and startups via funding from StartupUK and through a collaboration with Mutus, another UK startup focused on low-cost inputs for cultivated meat growth media.

Animal primary cells relevant for cultivated meat research are typically not only expensive and often of poor quality, but usually have limited information about their performance or provenance. Their use is also limited due to stringent licensing and commercial agreement requirements. Extracellular aims to address these barriers by providing animal primary cells suitable for cultivated meat research and development at up to 90% cheaper than other cell line providers and free from licensing restrictions.

From the announcement:

The cell banks initially offer cells isolated from the fat, muscle, and bone marrow tissues of cow, pig and lamb. Information on the cells’ provenance, from the age, breed, and sex of the animal, to the passage numbers and expected population doubling times, will be included with each batch. More animal species and tissue types will be made available in the future.

This move comes as more researchers and activists in the cultivated meat and future food space call for more open access to shared resources to accelerate development. Startups in the cultivated meat space typically hold their intellectual property close to the vest, but as venture capitalists have become more reticent about the space, there’s a growing realization in the community that some level of open-source-ish behavior will be required if the industry to continue to move forward and ultimately make a meaningful contribution in reducing industrial agriculture and its associated climate impacts.

New Harvest’s Isha Datar, who has been pushing for open access to cell ag (her group launched OpenCellAg last summer in partnership with CULT Food Science), emphasized this in her comments on the initiative: “Despite the venture capital and startup environment, there are many fundamental aspects of cellular agriculture that can (and must) be solved collectively. The efforts of Will Milligan and the team at Extracellular to share resources at low cost to equip and empower researchers to build a body of work is commendable leadership. In the near term, we need to go beyond traditional academia to build foundational work in this space; this type of initiative from the private sector is exactly what cellular agriculture needs. We need a culture of sharing and open science if we are to move this field forward. Too much depends on it.”

Cell banks will be made available starting next month to UK-based startups.

Are Cultivated Meat Forecasts Accurately Modeling In Misinformation Risk?

Last week, GFI published their annual state of the industry reports for the three major alt-protein technology ‘pillars’, plant-based meat, fermentation, and cultivated meat (and teased a fourth one).

Like many, I find the reports invaluable, as they are a good synthesis of the current scientific, regulatory, investment, and product evolution across the spaces.

The reports include an analysis of various industry forecasts, aggregating outlooks from research houses, industry analysts, and financial analysts. These forecasts for the alternative protein sector span over three decades and range from fairly conservative (Jeffries at ~$90 billion in 2040) to some bordering on wildly optimistic (Credit Suisse’s high forecast at $1.1 trillion in 2050).

As a former industry analyst, I appreciate the difficulty of forecast modeling future industries, especially ones that, like the alternative protein market, are still early stages. Each of the three alt-protein pillars falls into slightly different states of their evolutionary development: Plant-based meat can still be described as being in an early market phase, and newer forms of fermentation-based alt-proteins (such as precision fermentation) are still mostly nascent. Cell-cultured proteins, with the exception of some early trial rollouts, are still mostly non-existent on store shelves as of early 2023.

Market forecasting models inherently involve assumptions about various industry growth factors and inhibitors. In the report, GFI summarizes a few common forecast assumptions:

  • Taste and price parity are essential.
  • Consumer adoption is a limiting factor to market growth.
  • Innovation brings more innovation, investment brings more investment.

While GFI examines each in detail, I am mainly going to focus here on consumer adoption as a limiting factor to market growth. It is self-evident that a market requires consumers, and if they don’t adopt a product, there is no one to sell to.

In the cultivated meat market report, GFI opens its analysis of this assumption with the following:

Most alternative protein market forecasts see growth as dependent on consumers wanting and buying alternative protein products, with market penetration naturally following. Jefferies, for example, identifies consumer tastes and adoption as key drivers of market growth, and Boston Consulting Group states that growth relies on consumers being convinced of taste, texture, and price competitiveness in relation to conventional meat.

So far so good. I think Jefferies is correct in that consumer tastes and adoption are key to growth, and BCG is also right in that consumers must perceive the taste, texture, and price of these products as being on par to animal-based products. GFI acknowledges that consumer taste perception and overall adoption are important but adds that it is also critical for the industry to achieve the scale needed to meet consumer demand, which is closely related to pricing, given that price is largely a factor of supply and demand.

However, what the GFI report and the various publicly available writeups from BCG or Jefferies do not attempt to assess or quantify is the increased risk to the alternative protein industry from industry and product-related misinformation. Misinformation refers to conspiracy theories, half-truths, and purposefully misleading information propagated daily on social media. Those against newer forms of protein are rapidly increasing the volume of misinformation.

Here’s an example from this week:

The tweet above – which has been retweeted 10 thousand times and viewed a million times – features a false headline from a site (People’s Voice TV) that is known to traffic in misinformation. The article refers to an article in a publication called Naturalnews.com, which is loosely based on a piece in Bloomberg (which itself has been panned) about the use of what are called immortalized cells by prominent cell-cultured meat startups like UPSIDE and Eat Just. While the Bloomberg article doesn’t say anywhere in it that these cells have been proven to cause cancer, that didn’t stop People’s Voice TV or tens of thousands of people on Twitter from spreading the false narrative that these products cause cancer and – somehow – that Bill Gates is involved as some part of a large-scale conspiracy to exert control through… a new form of meat.

Does not analyzing the rise of misinformation about the industry and its products make the analysis by GFI or the industry analyst reports they cite bad? Not really. Traditional forecast models factor in basic assumptions around growth drivers and inhibitors and often look to existing market analogs, such as the traditional meat industry in this case, to make assumptions about potential market size, cannibalization, replacement, etc.

However, by not addressing them, I believe industry experts are underplaying the potential for this industry, particularly the cell-cultured meat market, to become stillborn. All one has to do is look at the significant impact of the wave of misinformation on COVID-19 vaccines to recognize the potential that misinformation (or disinformation) could have on cell-cultured meat. Much of the language used by those criticizing culvivated meat is reminiscent of some of the wildest anti-vax conspiracies, often sharing the same anti-science or “evil funder” tropes.

While I don’t have an exact answer for how they should account for the impact, I’d point to other types of risk analysis frameworks employed by industries and organizations to quantify future risks. Cybersecurity or national defense security frameworks are often focused on cataloging all potential risks to an organization or enterprise. One example of the type of risk assessment model is the one created by NIST, the US Department of Commerce for information security risk assessment.

This is just one example. There are many others, often focused on IT or national defense risk, that have defined ways to assess and quantify risk. Many of them are built to actually derive a number, in the form of lost enterprise or monetary value, for an organization based on risks.

In the NIST framework, they look to identify all potential threat sources and events, identify an organization or industry’s vulnerabilities, determine how likely they are to happen, the magnitude of impact, and then assess the risk. If this were applied to the case of alternative proteins, it would be relatively easy to work through this framework and identify a number of risks of misinformation from a variety of sources. Whether it’s organized groups such as traditional animal agriculture trade groups, politically motivated actors trying to catalyze sympathy towards a cause, or just social media influencers spreading misinformed memes, it’s best to recognize where misinformation is originating and to use risk analysis to prepare and inoculate yourself against it.

Some in this space have told me that they don’t want to give these types of tropes oxygen; therefore, it’s best to ignore them. While I can see their point, I’m not sure ignoring them is the best strategy for long-term survival. Social media has a way of providing oxygen to bad information, and so the best response is to recognize threats early and develop strategies for dealing with them. While I don’t have all the answers, I think advocates for alternative proteins need to be prepared for the coming wave of misinformation, and the best way to do that is to try to calculate its impact and develop strategies for dealing with it head-on.

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.