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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cellular Agriculture

The Netherlands House of Representatives Passes Motion to Legalize Samples of Cell-Cultured Meat

This week, the Netherlands’ House of Representatives passed a motion to make the sampling of cell-cultured meat legal. The passing of the motion, proposed by the D66 and VVD parties, is being hailed by Dutch cell-cultured meat companies as an important step towards legalizing the sale of cell-cultured meat at retail.

Maastricht, Netherlands-based Mosa Meat is famously co-founded by Mark Post, who kickstarted the lab-grown meat industry when he created the world’s first cell-cultured hamburger back in 2013. The company applauded the move by its home country’s government as a first step towards legalizing the consumption of the product.

The move “speaks volumes about the momentum that is building for innovation in sustainable meat production,” the company told Dutch TV organization RTL.

Dutch politicians are understandably proud that their country is seen as the birthplace for cell-cultured meat innovation and see this move as one that will help them continue to stay relevant as startups around the world race to bring their products to market.

“This is a wonderful Dutch invention that can become an important source of food for humans,” said VVD MP Peter Valstar. “But, as with many innovations, we see that European regulations delay development earlier, while the rest of the world is now overtaking us with our own invention.”

Mosa Meat’s Head of Public Affairs, Robert Jones, echoed the sentiment.

“Cellular agriculture is a Dutch invention and we do not want to lose our edge over competitors,” said Jones. “Companies abroad, including Germany, France, and Belgium, are already able to introduce their products to the general public as a way to gain support and acceptance from consumers, which is extremely important.”

The move by the Netherlands is another sign governments around the world recognize the need to pass legal frameworks to legalize the consumption of cell-cultured meat. In the US, the USDA just wrapped up a public comment period that garnered 1,700 comments from industry and private individuals. In many ways, the tone struck by many of the public comments was similar to sentiments expressed by Dutch politicians about the need to create a modern legal framework around lab-grown meat to ensure that their country remains competitive in this fast-changing market.

“Regulatory frameworks need to be redesigned to keep pace with innovation and technology and future-proof our food system,” wrote cellular agriculture research organization New Harvest. “We cannot expect this technology to positively impact our food system when it is built on an outdated regulatory foundation and minimum public scientific data.”

SuperMeat Partners With Japanese Food Giant Ajinomoto To Scale Cultivated Meat Production

SuperMeat, a cell-cultured meat company based in Israel, and Ajinomoto, a large Japanese food and biotechnology conglomerate, announced today the formation of a strategic partnership to “to establish a commercially viable supply chain platform for the cultivated meat industry.”

According to the announcement, the partnership, which will include an investment by Ajinomoto in SuperMeat, will combine SuperMeat’s expertise in cultivated meat with Ajinomoto’s R&D technology and expertise in biotech and fermentation capabilities.

One of the main focuses of the new partnership will be in the development of cell-cultured growth media, the broth which contains the nutrients needed for animal cell growth, which remains one of the biggest overall cost drivers in the creation of cultivated meat. According to a study by the Good Food Institute conducted in 2020 of cultivated meat producers, 72% of respondents indicated that cell growth media represented over 50% of their operating costs, and 38% said growth media represented 80% or more of operating costs. By combining SuperMeat’s technology advancements in cultivated meat with Anjinomoto’s biomanufacturing expertise, the two companies hope to drive down costs while increasing the supply of food-grade growth factors.

Anjinomoto’s partnership is a further signal of the interest by the Japan food industry in cell-cultured meat production. A number of Japanese investment funds recently participated in a $7 million investment round in Integriculture, one of Japan’s cultured meat pioneers, and before that Aleph Farms joined up with Mitsubishi to work on bringing cultured meat to the country. This interest in accelerating Japan’s cultivated meat industry is not surprising given the country’s historically low food self-sufficiency. Other countries with limited internal agriculture such as Singapore and Israel have identified future food sources like cultivated meat as strategically important, and Japan is following suit.

Cultivated Meat Has a Production Capacity Problem. Yossi Quint Has a Plan to Fix It.

Yossi Quint wants the cultivated meat industry to succeed. However, to reach its potential, he thinks the nascent industry has one major hurdle to overcome: a severe lack of production capacity.

Quint arrived at this conclusion while working at McKinsey, where he often worked on projects for clients in the food and beverage industry. During one deep dive into the cultivated meat market, he became convinced that this new form of food production had the potential to be a multibillion-dollar industry, but would never fulfill its potential unless it can increase production by orders of magnitude over its current capacity.

To get there, Quint believed that equipment used to make cell-cultivated meat – giant metal vats called bioreactors – needed to be built specifically for the market. That’s because bioreactors used by today’s cultivated meat producers are usually modified versions of hardware made for the pharmaceutical industry, an industry with completely different unit cost economics than that of food.

Out of this challenge, the idea for his company was born. Ark Biotech is building next-generation, high-volume bioreactors for the cultivated meat industry. I sat down with Quint to discuss the challenges of developing hardware for the cultivated meat industry and where he sees the infrastructure market going in the future. The answers have been lightly edited for brevity.

Why did you decide to start the company?

I was working at McKinsey had the opportunity to work with many different companies. And I had a chance to dig pretty deep into the cultivated meat space and think in-depth about what was needed in this industry to succeed over time—doing everything from consumer insights work to thinking about how to reduce unit economics and scale up. But, as I dug into scale-up, I quickly realized that biomanufacturing will be the bottleneck for this industry to grow. And that there are very few, perhaps no players, out there that are offering sensible solutions for industrial-scale cultivated meat production.

Today we’re seeing lots of companies building their pilot production plants. Over the next few years, as the industry figures it out and moves towards industrial scale, how big do you see cultivated meat bioreactors getting?

In pharma, there’s this trend towards smaller, single-use bioreactors. Single-use bioreactors are bioreactors with a bag inside that you switch out. They are very high OPEX (operating expense), but it reduces the contamination risk. But for the blockbuster drugs, you still have 10,000 to 25,000-liter bioreactor tanks. There’s no reason cultivated meat can’t be produced at that size or even larger.

What are the challenges that need to be overcome to move to bigger bioreactors?

There aren’t necessarily intrinsic issues. There are challenges when you reach a bigger scale; A contamination event has a larger cost because you’d have to throw out the batch, so that’s one reason to think about minimizing the size or guidance or ceiling. But to us, it’s a very simple optimization equation of ‘every batch is worth X dollars, the chance of contamination is y, where along the curve do you want to play’?

There are some thermodynamics, more physics and chemistry elements, such as where can you get the uniformity of the cell culture in the bigger size bioreactor. And that’s uniformity of oxygen, of making sure that mixing works correctly. It’s also making sure that the temperature can be uniform throughout.

A lot of what we’re working on is, how do you design bioreactors in ways that are different than what you’d see off the shelf today or from a specialized company, that could operate at bigger sizes?

Why are bigger bioreactors so important?

We care about size because it’s just a major cost lever. As a CAPEX (capital expense) cost lever and an OPEX (operating expense) cost lever.

Explain what you mean by that.

As a CAPEX lever, you get economies of scale. A lot of the cost of bioreactors is the manufacturing, and just you don’t need twice as many people producing twice the size. Most bioreactors have their own seed train (ed note: seed trains are used to generate an adequate number of cells for the inoculation of the production bioreactor). If you double the size of the bigger bioreactor, you only need half as many seed trains to get the same volume.

On the OPEX side, every seed train has laborers that are working, often 24/7, running experiments, changing parameters. And so, if you are able to double the size or triple or ten times the size, you don’t need ten times the laborers, you might need the exact same number of laborers.

Will all bioreactors be the same?

The bioreactors we’re designing are widely applicable to a very large swath of the industry. There are corner cases, but we’re trying to have bioreactors that will fit 95% of companies.

But there are a few bioreactor designs that we’re working on because if you’re doing a scaffolding system, that likely looks very different and you’ll need a very different looking bioreactor if you’re doing suspension cells. And so we are designing different bioreactors to fit those different use cases. Things like media or animal type. are heavily impactful to the parameters of the bioreactor, but we don’t think that changes the core bioreactor design.

The models will depend on their production methods. And it could be that you actually have two models, you have one model, where their cells are still growing in suspension, then you might want to then get a formed product and move into a second bioreactor. So there’s a number of companies that will have two production bioreactors today.

In the future, what does the cultivated meat industry production look like? Is it highly centralized, or does each city have its own ‘meat brewing’ center?

If I were to say 10 years, it’s still gonna be highly centralized. We’re gonna have megaplants. There’s just so many efficiencies that you get at scale.

Will they be regional?

It could be regional. It just depends on how big we want to go. I don’t think there’s gonna be one plant that supplies the US. It could be two or three plants in California that are very big the same way AB InBev has just a handful of massive plants.

Can you explain why bigger production plants are better?

One of the reasons that I think bigger plants make sense, at least as an interim step, is that we really think about the COGS (cost of goods sold) in a very deep way, a lot of which is like how do you get really cheap access to whatever the basal medium is. And to get really cheap access, you probably want to be located near where corn is shipped in, or whatever your other big ingredients are. You want to be near rail lines. You just want to get those economies of scale on the upstream. You also want to be co-located near cheap energy and preferably renewable energy. And so when you think about some of the inputs that you want, and just OPEX, and also where there is available labor, it’s harder to see a world in which you have a small production plant that’s in a skyscraper in New York.

Thank you for your time.

You’re welcome.

Wildtype Raises $100 Million in Series B Funding, Largest Ever for Cell Cultivated Seafood Company

Wildtype, a San Francisco-based cell-cultivated seafood startup, today announced it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round. The round, the largest to date for a cultivated seafood startup, is being led by private equity firm L Catterton and includes a number of high profile investors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Downey Jr. (through his Footprint Coalition and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions) among others.

The new funding comes after the company’s June 2021 launch of its pilot production plant. With its new funding in pocket, Wildtype plans to expand the production capacity of its cultivated salmon and to begin work with culinary and restaurant partners.

I sat down with company CEO Justin Kolbeck to learn more about what he sees in Wildtype’s future. According to Kolbeck, expanding production would not have been possible had it not been able to build a pilot production plant with its $12.5 million Series A.

“The organizing thought there was let’s build a pilot plant on Series A money,” Kolbeck said. “And we built the world’s first operational cultivated seafood pilot plant. Was it intended to be our go-to-market plant? No, the idea was, how could we set something up quickly and modularly, that we could add capacity to, and start learning from as we scaled.”

And according to Kolbeck, they learned a lot.

Photo: A Saku Block of Wildtype Cell-Cultivated Salmon

“If we had waited till now to start building the thing, we wouldn’t have had the data, we wouldn’t have the know-how to inform something like what is a sensible floor plan? Because we wouldn’t have gone through the motions of growing cells, creating the scaffold, seeding the cells on the scaffold, and so on. And now we’ve done that, we’ve learned a heck of a lot.”

According to Kolbeck, the company will use the new funding to move to a new facility in the San Francisco market and look to open a new production plant in the Pacific Northwest. But he cautioned that even with its expanded production capacity, the company’s overall output will be extremely limited over the next couple of years as they refine their technology and processes.

“In the early days, we will be a very supply-constrained business,” said Kolbeck. “The seafood market is 350 billion pounds a year, a staggering amount of volume. And, to be on the menu at five or six restaurants is just a drop in the bucket. And I think that’s what we’re talking about for the first year or so as more production comes online.”

Like other cellular agriculture startups, Wildtype’s product rollout requires approval from the US government. In their case, this means the FDA, which oversees the regulatory approval process for cell-cultured seafood. According to Kolbeck, that process has been smooth, and they are hopeful the FDA will soon give them (and others) the green light to begin selling their product to consumers.

As for a specific date for when that will happen, Kolbeck said they don’t have one, and there’s a reason for that.

“I think part of it’s because is it’s entirely bespoke. I think if you were to kind of get under a nondisclosure agreement and look at each (cell-cultivated seafood) company, all of our technologies are pretty significantly different from one to the next. And so I think FDA has to kind of look at them individually.”

If you want to hear my full conversation with Justin Kolbeck, you can hear it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

MeaTech Achieves Cultured Meat Milestone by Developing Muscle Fibers from Stem Cells

MeaTech3D, an Israel-based cultured meat startup, announced this week that it had demonstrated progress in the differentiation process from stem cells to muscle fibers.

According to the announcement, MeaTech has achieved the formation of living muscle fibers to a point where they “mirror key characteristics of farm-raised meat.” To achieve the results, MeaTech isolated bovine stem cells, which were then proliferated in the lab. From there, they were able to differentiate these cells into matured muscle cells with improved muscle fiber density, thickness, and length.

This news from MeaTech is just the latest from the startup as they assemble a toolbox of technologies to replicate whole cut animal meat using cell-cultured processes. In September of last year, they announced they had developed a new stem cell manipulation technology that uses plant inputs to transform embryonic mesenchymal stem cells (or eMSCs) into fat cells. That process could be used to replicate intramuscular fat, the fat structures that ribbon through a sophisticated cut of meat such as a ribeye steak. Before that, the company filed for a patent for its technology that 3D prints cell-cultured meat products.

MeaTech isn’t the only group working on developing technology to create muscle fibers via cellular agriculture. Last year, a group of researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan were able to replicate muscle fibers via cell culture process. The Japanese group achieved a level of elasticity, as the strands contracted in the same way muscle fibers contract.

Meat 2.0: An American Opportunity

Guest Authors: Yossi Quint and Blake Byrne

Over the past half century, the U.S. went from being by far the biggest meat producer in the world to trailing China as a distant second. Today, the protein industry is confronted with a seismic innovation–the rise of alternative protein–that could again radically alter the world’s protein landscape. The alternative protein industry is growing quickly and has the potential to be the protein of the future. In China, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs recently included Cultivated meats and other alternative proteins like plant-based eggs as part of its 5-year blueprint for food security. Unfortunately, in the U.S., companies and government agencies are largely ignoring this revolutionary moment and are ceding an opportunity to lead the alternative protein industry to other countries. This strategy, or lack thereof, is antithetical to both our economic and security interests.

In 1961, the U.S. produced over 6x as much meat as China. Today, China produces almost 2x as much meat as the U.S. The gap between the two countries increases to 3x if you include seafood (170 million tons vs. 52 million tons). And the gap is only widening. A USDA report recently led with the headline “China Meat Supply Continues to Grow.” And the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 8% of all farmworker jobs (farm, ranch, and aquacultural animals) will be lost over the next decade. 

The U.S. wasn’t always a laggard in meat production and innovation. In 1878, cattle dealer Gustavus Swift commissioned the design of a refrigerated railroad car. This invention allowed for butchered meat to be shipped without going bad, enabling efficiencies in both the slaughtering and transport of meat. This technological innovation marked a watershed moment in the democratization of meat. For the first time, Americans across the country purchased cheaper and more diverse cuts of fresh beef. Meanwhile, Chicago became a rail hub for major meatpackers and the heart of a beef Empire in the West. The meatpackers’ quick ascent was supported by a regulatory environment that prioritized cheap and sanitary beef.  In the end, U.S. meatpackers leveraged their new position and government support, to become the world’s beef powerhouse. 

Today, we are at a similarly pivotal moment in the production of protein. The global introduction of alternative protein (plant-based meat, fermentation derived ingredients, and cultivated meat – meat grown from animal cells in a controlled environment) may well be a moment in the meat industry’s history of equal or greater importance than the introduction of refrigerated railroad cars. Alternative protein has experienced rapid growth over the past decade with major food and agriculture companies entering the space with billions of dollars in investments. Multiple tailwinds, such as consumers’ concern for sustainability, nutrition, and animal welfare, suggest that alternative protein will grow from less than 1% of total meat volume today, to 5%-10% of the global meat market over the next decade (see estimates from Barclays, BCG, Bloomberg).

Unlike traditional animal protein, alternative protein production does not require large grassy plains or low-cost soy to support the animals. Instead, the main need for the protein companies of tomorrow is large-scale manufacturing infrastructure, such as fermentation and bioreactor farms (massive brewery-like factories). The infrastructure required for the production of alternative protein can be built anywhere. 

Other countries have taken note. China is including these new types of protein in the roadmap for its future. Singapore, a country with minimal livestock production, became the first country in the world to approve the sale of cultivated meat, and is now considered an industry growth hub. Multiple startups now call Singapore home, owing to broad institutional support for the alternative protein industry by the government and state-backed investors. Qatar, another country with minimal historical livestock production, recently announced a deal with a U.S. company to commercialize cultivated-meat. One question now remains: will the U.S. capitalize on this new once-in-a-generation opportunity, or continue to lose jobs and market share to other countries?

Since the 19th century, the food system has become increasingly global. The shift from animal-based protein to alternative protein has the power to shift geographic centers of production and determine which corporations, new or old, command the trillion dollar fortunes attached to protein’s production. But the future is not predetermined. Where these major production centers develop and which companies will control the key infrastructure is still taking shape. Will the U.S. be a leader in this burgeoning space or go down the roads of solar energy and battery industries, which are now dominated by China. Alternative protein represents another critical inflection point for the U.S. to lead in a key industry of tomorrow. 

About the authors:Yossi Quint is the Founder & CEO of Ark Biotech, which develops cultivated meat production systems. Previously, Yossi was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company where he specialized in alternative protein. Blake Byrne is a graduate student in biotechnology at the University of Cambridge. Previously, he served as the lead Science & Technology analyst for the Good Food Institute, an alternative protein think tank.

Former US Defense Official: Cell-Cultured Meat & Other Future Food Technology is Critical For US National Security

Last week, the future food industry was abuzz with the news that China had put cell-cultured meat and other future food technologies in its five-year plan.

According to Matt Spence, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East Policy under the Obama administration, this type of move shouldn’t be all that surprising given how critical many leaders in emerging economies view food innovation to their national security.

“What what used to keep me up at night when I was at the Defense Department running Middle East policy was what type of attack is ISIS is going to launch?” said Spence last month, speaking on a panel (moderated by yours truly) at the Consumer Electronics Show. “How to plan for war with Iran? How are we thinking about going after Osama bin Laden?”

According to Spence, who is now managing director for investment and advisory firm Guggenheim Partners, what worried leaders around the region was very different.

“When I talked to leaders in the region, what kept them up at night was ‘do I have enough food and water to feed my population?’. They are realizing they have a way of producing meat that people want more of as they get wealthier, and others are appetites and demand for luxury change. And the equation doesn’t add up unless we do something new.”

While Spence himself may have come away from these conversations with a greater conviction that food technology is an essential part of a national security framework, the US still has no comprehensive plan around building a food future nearly seven years after he left the State Department. That’s not to say some parts of the US government responsible for food regulation and policy haven’t been slowly progressing on regulatory frameworks for some future food. Still, like with many things driven by US agencies, it’s all relatively piecemeal, and there’s no real cohesive strategy to it.

Maybe that will change. There are signs, after all, that the US government sees this as important, such as the recent grant given to Tufts to create an alt-protein center of excellence. But again, these are small gestures compared to the all-in approach we’ve seen from China, Israel, Taiwan, and other countries.

But who knows? As the Biden administration takes another swing at a slimmed-down Build Back Better bill in 2022 and works on other spending priorities in the second half of his term, let’s hope he and others in his administration begin to work on developing a more comprehensive, forward-looking plan to build a more sustainable food future. I’ve even written down a few ideas he could use to get started.

According to Spence, the timing is good for cell-cultivated meat and other future food technologies to begin making a difference.

“There’s a technology and a change we can make every day by what we eat, and I’m hard-pressed to find other areas of national security that there is that type of ready solution available.”

Just click play below if you want to watch the Future of Meat panel from CES 2022 to hear Matt Spence and others.

As Future Food Companies Look to Grow, A New Crop of Startups Lend a Hand on Biomanufacturing Scale-up

While companies creating precision fermented and cell-cultured food products continue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the reality is their products are still years away from making a significant dent in the overall consumption of a growing global population.

The primary reason for this is that these products still aren’t being produced at nearly the scale they need to feed billions of people. Some estimates have put the biomanufacturing capacity needed by 2030 at 10 billion liters in order to meet the projected demand for fermentation-based animal proteins.

The good news is that a growing number of companies are building out technology and services platforms to help these companies move towards scaled production. One such company is Solar Biotech, which makes customized plant architectures to help future food and other companies scale up their biomanufacturing capacity. The company has been working with startups such as Motif Foodworks and TurtleTree Labs to help them develop their product and move towards higher capacity production.

With Motif, Solar helped them move into pilot production manufacturing for their new plant-based meat ingredient building block, HEMAMI. In partnerships like this, Solar will assist a company with technology transfer of their early products towards higher-scale manufacturing using what it calls its SynBio Hyperintegration Algorithms (SHAs). The end result of its proprietary algorithms is creating customized and modular production facilities built around what the company calls BioNodes.

The partnership worked so well for Motif in developing its HEMAMI product line that the company recently extended its collaboration with Solar.

“The continuation of our partnership will help secure the infrastructure needed to build out Motif’s pipeline of future products,” said Jonathan McIntyre, CEO of Motif FoodWorks, of his partnership with Solar. “Companies like Solar Biotech are an essential link in the move to create a more sustainable food-supply chain that has a positive impact on people, animals and the planet.”

Pow Bio is another company that brings scale-up expertise to new food startups. Pow helps startups building alternative proteins with the necessary fermentation capacity and infrastructure to help move their product concept off the bench and into production scale.

“We have a complete fermentation lab that scales and can take you from a flask you can hold in your hand to 1000L liters of fermentation capacity, which covers the entire ‘pilot’ stage of scale-up,” said cofounder Shannon Hall.

Pow helped alt-cheese startup New Culture take its early lab work and scale-up for pilot production. Before New Culture worked with Pow, their product cost roughly $100,000 to produce a kilogram of cheese. After working with Pow, the company’s product has dropped significantly and is approaching price parity with traditional cheese.

And then there’s Culture Biosciences, a startup that investor Dave Friedberg has described as an ‘AWS for bioreactors’. The company initially started with cloud-connected 250mL stirred tank bioreactors for fast-cycle bench development as a service, and in October of last year took on funding to expand and build out 5L and 250L bioreactors to help move from bench to pilot-scale production.

“Through Culture, we now have the option of a one-stop-shop for bench-scale testing and pilot-scale production,” said Ranjan Patnaik, CTO of alt-egg startup The EVERY Company. “We can develop a process with Culture and easily make a large batch of material. Other benefits include accelerating product pipeline development, data-driven, and lower-risk scaling, and saving them time and money required to build additional fermentation capacity.”

As innovators in the future food industry work on developing their products, these three companies look to play a pivotal role in helping them make the leap. But these three aren’t the only ones, and I expect to see more startups emerge to help fill the biomanufacturing commercialization gap for future food products as investors realize the future food industry doesn’t lack for good ideas, but what it does lack the scale-up and production capacity needed to feed billions of people by 2030.

UPSIDE Foods Adds Cell-Cultured Seafood to the Menu With Acquisition of Cultured Decadence

Today UPSIDE Foods announced they have acquired Cultured Decadence. The deal adds cell-cultured seafood products, including lobster and other crustaceans, to the UPSIDE portfolio.

Cultured Decadence, which was a Smart Kitchen Summit Startup Show finalist in 2020, was founded in Milwaukee the same year and will remain in the midwest, serving as UPSIDE’s ‘midwest hub.’

The news comes just a couple of months after the opening of UPSIDE’s flagship scale-up production facility in Berkeley. While the company has announced that cultivated chicken will be its first commercially available product, they have made it clear that their new facility will be able to produce a variety of different cell-cultured animal products.

“Seafood has a rich and delicious culinary tradition that makes it a favorite across the globe,” said Dr. Uma Valeti, Founder and CEO of UPSIDE Foods. “Cultured Decadence’s technology is incredibly promising, and their team is filled with passionate, smart individuals who want to make our favorite food a force for good. We’re thrilled to welcome the Cultured Decadence team to the UPSIDE family and are excited that the scientific, technological, and production infrastructure we have built over many years can help accelerate the mission impact of this team.”

One factor that may have made Cultured Decadance attractive – outside of the addition of cell-cultured seafood to the UPSIDE’s portfolio – is the difference in regulatory oversite in the US between seafood and poultry. The USDA and the FDA struck an agreement early on that the USDA will oversee the labeling framework for livestock and poultry, while the FDA will be the sole body regulating food products made with fish (except, for some reason, catfish, which the USDA oversees). Not only has the FDA had a year’s head start on the USDA in seeking public comments for the labeling of cell-cultured products, but some in the industry believe that the FDA might provide an easier regulatory glide path towards commercial availability when it comes to cultivated meat products.

Outside of regulatory considerations, it’s likely that UPSIDE’s development of its cell-cultured poultry products is further along than the much younger – and smaller – Cultured Decadence’s products, which may still require some significant cell-line development. UPSIDE has already had tastings of its products and they have been working towards commercial scale-up in their new flagship facility.

Finally, the acquisition by UPSIDE could also be an early sign of forthcoming consolidation by cell-cultured meat companies. Guessing by size of some of the recent funding rounds (including UPSIDE’s), it’s clear that the cost of bringing a cell-cultured meat product to scale will likely be in the tens to hundreds of millions, and at some point, it makes more sense for companies in this space to leverage existing investment in pilot and scale-up production infrastructure.

Mosa Meat (Kinda) Open Sources Its Method For Cultivating Meat Without FBS

In recent years, Mosa Meat has made a couple of things clear: 1) They want to get as close to creating real meat without the cow as possible, and 2) They want to achieve this goal in the most humane, animal-free way.

They’ve documented their progress towards achieving both of these goals along the way, first by making news in 2016 with the announcement they’d figured out a method for cultivating meat without the use of FBS, or fetal bovine serum. Since that time, they’ve updated the world on their progress and even shared techniques for how they make “real meat” complete with cell-cultured fat and muscle fibers.

And this week, the company made news again with the publication of a paper on its method for achieving muscle differentiation through a process they describe as ‘serum-starvation.’ According to Mosa, it’s through the differentiating of cells into fibers that result in the structure and chew of meat, and it’s within the muscle fibers that the proteins and rich color of meat are produced.

The paper’s primary author, Tobias Messmer, describes how they focused on the proteins on the surface of cells to achieve this differentiation without FBS.

“By specifically activating these proteins (known as ‘receptors’), we are now able to recreate the same transition in the absence of any FBS.”

With the publication of this information, the company has essentially open-sourced the ideas behind achieving animal-free cell-cultured meat. However, the company hasn’t technically open-sourced the methods for re-use since they’ve also constructed some level of IP protection around elements of the process.

From Mosa founder Maarten Bosch: “Although the decision to publish this information could be seen as competitively sensitive, we highly value openness and transparency for the advancement of the entire cellular agriculture field. We’re also dedicated to creating a healthy business and protecting our intellectual property. Having made significant progress since submitting this paper over a year ago, we are convinced we are striking the right balance with this publication.“

It’s not that open source ideas and technologies are entirely incompatible with patent protection. In software, you can open source a technology and include a patent license grant as part of the open-source license. From the sounds of it, Mosa is specifically protecting its FBS-free feed formulation, limiting its use for commercial purposes without a license.

From the announcement: “We have filed a patent for the cell feed formulation, meaning it is publicly available but protected for commercial use for a limited amount of years.”  

Patent protection or not, the industry certainly benefits from Mosa’s sharing of their processes as they innovate towards what they call “real meat” without the animal.

Investor Look: 10 Trends to Watch in Ag + Food Tech in 2022

Food, ocean and agtech venture fund S2G Ventures released a report citing ten catalysts that will shape intersecting industries including agriculture, food manufacturing, nutrition and food retail in 2022. The report examines the trends that are driving the transition to a climate-smart, healthy food system.

S2G — investor in several food and agtech startups — looks at technology disruption in three major categories including agricultural innovation, supply chain disruption and personalized food and nutrition.

“The food transition is still in its infancy but is being propelled by seismic tailwinds: massive demographic change spurring new consumer demand, significant advancements in the biology, chemistry and physics of food production to create new choices and now capital markets anchored by ESG that want to fund high growth, disruptive companies,” commented Sanjeev Krishnan, S2G Ventures Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer.

Farmers in the US are facing new challenges every day from nutrient-challenged soil to lack of access to capital. The S2G report describes the ways that innovation in fintech, robotics and biotech along with an increase in socially and environmentally conscious investing (ESG) will lead to the “fourth industrial revolution” in farms across the country.

The drivers of innovation in farming include:

  • Robots will increase efficiency while reducing labor needs across the food system.
  • The rise of ESG will help to digitize the farm.
  • Fintech will transform opportunities in agriculture, just as it did for the student loan and mortgage markets.
  • RNA technology that saved lives during Covid-19 will be applied to farms to save soils.

Supply chain disruptions experienced over the past two years have catalyzed both governmental institutions NGOs and the private sectors to fund and drive innovation in biotech, cellular agriculture and food waste solutions. The result according to S2G Ventures will be supply chains that are more nimble, sustainable, localized and less wasteful.

Innovations that will revolutionize supply chains include:

  • Fermentation will power the next generation of alternative protein products.
  • Cellular protein will provide consumers around the world with safe, sustainable food.
  • Adoption of food waste solutions will be recognized as both a good business practice and an essential tool for feeding the world.

Even prior to the pandemic, consumers were demonstrating a desire for better food choices and a renewed focus on ways to personalize their nutrition and healthcare. To answer this demand, food and nutrition startups are using cutting-edge bio and food science as well as AI and machine learning to develop nutrient-dense, functional and personalized food products.

Personalized food & nutrition catalysts include:

  • AI and machine learning platforms will unlock greater understanding of and use cases for plants and fungi.
  • Food will become central to the effort to prevent chronic disease and improve health outcomes.
  • Food brands and grocers will have to “personalize or perish.”

To dig into more details on areas to watch in food and agtech this year, download the full report from S2G Ventures.

Alt. Protein Round-Up: Wildtype’s Sushi, Cultivated Dokdo Shrimp

Ask any cultivated meat startup in the US and they’ll tell you it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. government grants regulatory approval to sell cell-cultivated meat in the United States. Given their vested interest in this rapidly changing market, many of these same startups had something to say as part of the USDA’s recent public comment period on labeling standards for cultivated meat and poultry products. Some 1,700 total comments were received and The Spoon sifted through many of these comments and connected the threads so you don’t have to. You can read Camille Bond’s summary here.

There was lots of other news this week in the alternative protein space, including Wildtype’s distribution agreement, CellMEAT’s new FBS-free growth serum and cultivated shrimp prototype, Eric Jenkusky’s thoughts on the cultivated meat space, and GOOD Meat in Singapore.

Wildtype to bring cultured seafood to retailers and restaurants in the U.S.

In the United States, we will likely be seeing cultivated seafood in sushi bars, restaurants, and grocery stores within the next year. Wildtype, a company based in San Francisco, California, signed an agreement this week with Pokéworks, a restaurant operator with 65 locations, and Snowfox, a sushi bar that operates within grocery stores with 1,230 locations. The intention of the distribution agreement is to allow the masses to get a taste of cultivated seafood in an affordable and accessible manner. Due to the fact that regulatory approval has yet to be granted, it is currently unclear when this distribution will occur.

CellMEAT’s FBS-free growth serum and cultivated Dokdo shrimp

CellMEAT is a cultivated meat/seafood company based in Korea, and this week, the company announced two different pieces of news. First off, the company has successfully developed a growth serum for animal cells that does not require the use of Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS). This particular ingredient raises concern amongst animal welfare groups and activists (because it is harvested from the fetuses of pregnant cows during slaughter), and it is extremely expensive. FBS is one reason why cultivated products have continued to have such a high price tag, but many companies in this space have been working towards changing the ingredients found in their growth serums.

The second piece of news from CellMEAT is that the company unveiled a prototype of its cultivated Dokdo shrimp. The shrimp was actually created with the company’s new FBS-free growth serum. According to CellMEAT, the alternative shrimp was created in a variety of different shapes and sizes for a diversity of cooking applications.

Eric Jenkusky of Matrix Meats calls for transparency in the cultivated meat space

In September, the USDA opened a public comment period to solicit input about the labeling of cultivated meat products. The move was widely seen as an important step forward in the regulatory approval process for the commercial sale of cultivated meat products in the United States, which many anticipate will happen soon. When cultivated meat finally does make it to market, it’s important that consumers know exactly what’s in the product, at least according to Eric Jenkusky. Read the full article here.

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat granted regulatory approval to sell new cultivated chicken products in Singapore

Today Eat Just announced its GOOD Meat division has received the regulatory go-ahead to sell new types of cultivated chicken products in Singapore. The company will debut one of the new formats, a chicken breast, at the JW Marriott Singapore South Beach next week. The green light comes just over a year after the company received the world’s first approval to sell cultivated meat from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), Singapore’s regulatory authority for food safety. Read the full article here.