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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cellular Agriculture

Koby Nahmias Knew Cell-Based Meat Had Huge Potential But Was Too Expensive. He Set About Changing That.

Something was bothering Yaakov Nahmias.

The longtime bioengineer had been sitting alongside the Charles River near MIT drinking coffee when he got a call from an investor in Israel who wanted to know what he thought about Mark Post’s famous quarter-million euro hamburger.

“I told him, it’s probably the silliest idea I’ve ever heard,” said Nahmias, who also goes by Koby, in an interview with The Spoon.

It wasn’t the science itself Nahmias thought was silly – the longtime bioengineer knew making a burger in a lab was an impressive scientific feat – but rather the idea that consumers would pay hundreds of dollars, let alone hundreds of thousands, for a burger no matter how science-forward meat the meat is.

Sitting there, Nahmias began to think about what it would take to bring down the cost of growing meat in a bioreactor to result in prices approachable enough for the average consumer.

It wouldn’t be easy. As the founding director of the Alexander Grass Center for Bioengineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a longtime consultant to the pharma industry, Nahmias knew that this type of complicated biotech cell-reproduction work was hugely expensive and – the way things were structured back in 2015 – totally impractical for producing low-cost consumables.

Yaakov “Koby” Nahmias

But Nahmias also thought that maybe it didn’t need to be this way. After all, he had colleagues who ran an insect farm, which had a much lower cost per unit of biomass produced. So why, he wondered, was creating meat using cellular agriculture so much more expensive than other forms of biomass production?

One reason was that cells produced make a lots of toxins like ammonia. And, unlike insects which have livers to remove these toxins, cells produced in bioreactors “essentially grow in their own urine,” Nahmias said.

When he looked around for systems are good at ammonia removal, the obvious example was the aquarium.

“If you’re growing fish, and and you are giving them too much food, there is too much protein that breaks down into ammonia,” said Nahmias. “The only way to treat it is by adding zeolites that will bind the ammonia relatively fast. So using that type of insight, you can design a process that will do it at scale.”

Another early insight Nahmias had was that pharma bioreactors often grew one type of animal cell – hamster ovary cells – which are commonly used for vaccine development. While hamster cells grow easily in traditional bioreactors, that’s not the case with meat like beef or chicken.

But perhaps the biggest challenge Nahmias saw was the cost of growth medium used to feed the cells. After consulting to the pharma industry for the last decade, he knew it took about 10 liters of culture medium to make 1 kilogram of biomass. At what he estimated to be $20 per liter for medium at that time, he thought even with the world’s most advanced tech, they’d start hit a cost floor of around $200 per kilogram.

He would spend the next six months focused on reengineering the process of cell-based meat production. But this was only the beginning. Nahmias knew that it would take some time to commercialize his work.

So not long after, he would start a company called SuperMeat with a couple of other cofounders, where he further developed these early ideas. That company would eventually split up a year later and Nahmias would go on to found his current company, Future Meat Technologies, where he set about creating a scaled system for making low-cost cell-based meat.

Fast forward to today and he’s doing just that. Future Meat regularly makes news about reaching ever lower prices for its cell-based chicken, which is why I wanted to talk to him about how he achieved cost milestones that many have thought wouldn’t be achievable for at least half a decade.

You can listen to my full interview with Nahmias on the latest episode of The Food Tech Show. Just click play below or get the episode at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Shiok Meats Acquires Gaia Foods, Will Add Beef to Its Cultured Meat Lineup

Shiok Meats, a company best known for its developments in cultured seafood, has acquired a 90 percent steak in Gaia Foods, according to Tech in Asia, which broke the news. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Through the deal, Singapore’s Shiok Meats will add “a variety of red meat products” to its roster, since the company will be able to draw on Gaia Foods expertise in developing cultured beef. Gaia, also based in Singapore is also developing cultured pork and mutton.

Both companies are targeting markets in Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Japan, Taiwan, India, and South Korea. Shiok Meats hopes to blend cultured beef and shrimp in order to create a product that can be used in a variety of dishes, from dumplings and noodles to spring rolls.

Shiok raised an undisclosed round of bridge funding last month that will go towards building out a production facility in Singapore. The company said at the time of the funding that it plans to launch commercially in that market by 2023 at the latest. Speaking to Tech in Asia today, company CEO Sandhya Sriram said Shiok Meats is ready to “power through to commercialization.”

Singapore is currently the only country in the world that has granted regulatory approval to sell cultured meat, and to just one company, Eat Just. Gaining its own approval — in Singapore and elsewhere — will be a major next step for Shiok on its path to commercialization. 

Beyond regulatory approval, Shiok Meats and every other company developing cultivated meat has a host of challenges to contend with before consumers can buy their products en masse at restaurants and grocery stores. Those challenges span everything from making cell lines more available to finding cheaper, less ethically hazy growth mediums, and educating the average consumer about what cultured meat actually is and why we need to consider it as a protein source in the first place.  

Gaia founders Vinayaka Srinivas and Hung Nguyen will lead the Shiok Meats technical team’s development process for cultured red meat products for the company moving forward. Meanwhile, Sriram told Tech in Asia that deals like this one will become “priorities” in the near-term future for the company.

Report: S2G Ventures Talks Alt-Protein, the Digitization of Grocery, and Other Areas of Food the Pandemic is Reshaping

“We continue to see the pandemic act as a catalyzing agent to accelerate trends that were in motion before it began. We believe that food and agriculture has undergone significant structural changes that will alter the course of the industry.” 

So says a new report from S2G Ventures, a VC firm based in Chicago, Illinois. The report, titled “The Ingredients for a Food System Revolution,” analyzes eight pandemics and outbreaks throughout history to pinpoint patterns around financial and economic recovery, innovation, and behavioral changes and norms. The analysis gives a clue as to how the current COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping norms, particularly when it comes to how we produce, get, and eat our food.

As an investment firm, S2G focuses mainly on the food and agriculture sectors, and counts AppHarvest, Shenandoah Growers, and Trace Genomics among its portfolio companies. It follows, then, that the new report is largely focused on how pandemics, epidemics, and outbreaks in the past have changed our food system and how the COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to do that at this very moment. “More decentralization [is] going to occur, more convergence of food and health, more decommodification as well,” Sanjeev Krishnan, S2G Ventures Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer, tells The Spoon.

As the report notes, “While there are many factors influencing the future of our food system, the study of past pandemic economic history is starkly consistent – an innovation cycle begins, and old habits and norms do shift.” 

A couple especially compelling areas where this is happening include alternative protein and online grocery.

As traditional meat-processing facilities face challenges and the unit economics for some types of alt-protein go down, we’re seeing more of the latter make its way into the mainstream. Krishnan explains we are moving more and more towards an “all of the above” view of protein. “I think there’s going to be animal protein, plant protein, and cell protein,” he says. Production of animal protein, in particular, will see “natural momentum around more niche, regional, decommoditized” products. Plant-based proteins, meanwhile, will see an increased focus on nutrition and affordability, while more countries will follow Singapore’s lead when it comes to cultivated meat. China is another important place to watch in this area, according to Krishnan.

S2G’s report also honed in on channel digitization, and specifically on the grocery sector. The report notes that a forced transition to online grocery during the pandemic “exponentially increased penetration from 24% to 49% between 2019 and 2020. Seniors became the fastest-growing segment of online shoppers on Instacart in 2020. In future, consumers will take “a hybrid approach” to groceries, and retailers will start to slightly differentiate what they sell online versus in the brick-and-mortar store.

The report also calls out controlled environment agriculture, a convergence of food and health, and food and agriculture digitization as other key areas to watch in terms of how the pandemic is reshaping the food system.  

“We can build a more resilient and hopeful food system that both addresses planet health and human health coming out of this,” says Krishnan. “Let’s use the pain and the agony and the anxiety that occurred as a call to action.

Multus Media Raises $2.2M for Cultured Meat Serum Replacement

Multus Media, a startup working on a replacement for animal serum used in cultivating meat, announced today that it has raised a £1.6 milliion (~$2.2M USD) Seed round of funding. Investors in the round include SOSV, Zero Carbon Capital, Marinya Capital and angel investor Sake Bosch. The round also includes an equity-free grant of £106,000 (~$146,000 USD) from the UK Research and Innovation Council.

Founded in 2019, Multus Media was spun out of SOSV’s IndieBio program and is developing a new type of growth medium for use in creating cultured meat that is more economical that current solutions. Serum is what cultivated animal cells are placed in, allowing them to grow and form cultured meat. Serum is also an expensive part of the cultivation process with the controversial fetal bovine serum costing $200 per liter. But it’s not just the cost of the serum itself, it’s how much is used to culture meat.

As Cai Linton, Multus Media CEO explained to me last week, part of the issue is how quickly existing serum formulations deplete. Linton said that because of this depletion, serums need to be replaced every two to three days in order to keep the meat cells growing. Multus is developing a formulation that will last twice that, saving cultured meat companies money because they don’t need to buy as much of it.

Right now, Multus has identified the formulation of proteins, compounds and other ingredients it needs to make its serum. The next phase will be producing the serum, dubbed Proliferum M. Linton said that the company is looking to bring its first product to market by the end of this year, and ramp up production by the end of 2022. Multus’ formulation is not animal free at this point, though Linton said it will be as they scale up production. By 2026, the company projects that Proliferum M will cost less than $1 per liter.

There are a number of startups working on novel replacements for animal-based growth serums. In South Korea, Seawith is using algae to create both growth serum and scaffolding in cultured meat. In Canada, Future Fields is developing an animal-free serum designed to cultivate chicken.

Bringing the cost of cultured meat into parity with animal meat is a critical part of the market gaining widespread adoption. We’ve already seen companies like Mosa Meat and Future Meat both slash the production costs of their cultured meat over the past year. Perhaps Multus Media can help them, and other players in the space, bring those costs down even further.

Mzansi Meat Co. is Bringing Cultured Meat to Africa

After Eat Just gained regulatory approval in Singapore for its cultured meat last year, companies from countries all over the world are racing to bring their cultured meat products to market. We’ve heard news from Asia, the United States, Europe, and Australia regarding cultured meat, but one continent that seems to be left out of this space is Africa. Mzansi Meat Co., based in South Africa, is changing this as the first cultured meat company on the continent of Africa.

This week I spoke with Brett Thompson, a co-founder and the CEO of Mzansi Meat Co., who said he realized “There is no one doing cultivated meat or cellular agriculture in the entire African continent, which is insane to think about. The opportunity was there, and that is the beginning of our story.” The co-founders formed the company in 2020, and shortly after connected with scientist and CEO of Wild Earth, Ryan Bethencourt. Bethencourt invested in Mzansi Meat Co., which enabled the co-founders to start building out a team.

Mzansi Meat Co. is developing cell lines by extracting cells from animal donors, which are not harmed in the process. After the cells are extracted, they are grown in a bioreactor and then are differentiated into muscle and fat cells. Cultured meat companies have traditionally used FBS (fetal bovine serum) as a growth medium, but Mzansi is in discussion with companies that create growth factors from non-animal derived sources. The company will first focus on beef, using the biomass end product as an ingredient for ground meat. Eventually, the company will work on producing cultured whole cuts.

Representing the food and farming culture of Africa is important to Mzansi Meat Co., and the company will be extracting cells from indigenous cattle breeds. Recently, the start-up asked South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa if they could extract cells from his prize-winning Ankole cattle herd to produce sought-after beef cuts without any slaughter.

“Braai” means to barbeque or grill food over an open fire, and this type of social gathering is a huge part of African culture. More urbanized countries and areas in Africa, like South Africa, tend to gravitate towards eating more Western styles of meat analogs for braais, like sausages and burgers patties. Mzansi Meat Co. will first start out with these analogs, and then begin producing more traditionally African cuts of meat.

As the first cultured meat company in Africa, Mzansi Meat Co. does not seem to face local competition in this space. However, Thompson said that there are possibly one or two other cultured meat start-ups in South Africa (this is currently all the information we have). With Mzansi, we are starting to see more activity with alternative proteins in Africa. VeggieVictory is the first plant-based meat company in Nigeria, and earlier this year it raised an undisclosed pre-seed round (Bethencourt also invested in this company).

Mzansi Meat Co. is currently in its pilot production phase, and hopes to have its first products available to sample by the end of this year. By the second half of next year, the company aims to have its products on retail shelves.

UPDATE: This article originally stated that Mzansi Meat does not face competition in South Africa; according to Thompson there are one or two other cultured meat start-ups in the country.

Air Protein, GOOD Meat, IntegriCulture Among the Semifinalists for XPRIZE’s Alt-Protein Competition

Nonprofit XPRIZE has announced 28 semifinalists teams that will move forward in the Feed the Next Billion competition. The multi-year competition will support companies developing compelling chicken and fish alternatives that replicate or outperform the real thing in terms of nutrition, environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and taste and texture. 

The competition, first announced at the end of 2020, is being conducted in partnership with ASPIRE, the project management arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). Grand-prize winners will not be chosen until 2024. when multiple winners will collectively receive $15 million.

For now, the 28 finalists chosen to continue the competition will have the next year to work with the competition, ASPIRE, and The Tony Robbins Foundation to develop the first iterations of their products. Up to 10 finalist teams will be chosen towards the end of 2022 and will split a “milestone award” of $2.5 million. 

Those 10 finalists will have one last round of competition where they will need to create “at least twenty-five cuts of structured chicken breast or fish fillet analogs of 115 gram or four ounce that replicate the sensory properties, versatility, and nutritional profile of conventional chicken or fish.” One grand prize winner will receive $7 million, with second- and third-place winners getting $2 million and $1 million, respectively.

The 28 finalists chosen this week represent all three pillars of alternative protein: plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation. Some of these companies are better known than others. Eat Just’s GOOD Meat, for example, is the only company in the world that has regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat (in Singapore). MeatOurFuture, on the other hand, is a public-private partnership that is known primarily in South Africa at this point. Others, including plant-based seafood company Brew51 from India, Japan’s IntegriCulture, and Air Protein, are all at various stages of development in terms of their products.

You can read the full list of companies, which span 14 different countries, here.

XPRIZE’s Feed the Next Billion competition was developed in response to the organization’s Future of Food Impact Roadmap, where the organization pinpointed 12 “breakthrough opportunities” that could help build a better food system. Alt-protein is a major area.

No one company developing alternative proteins has yet proven their technology and/or ingredients can feed the next billion. There remain many, many questions around the nutrition of products, the cost of making them, and, for some, whether or not they can ever really be produced at that scale. XPRIZE’s competition will no doubt go some ways towards answering those questions over the next few years.  

Aleph Farms Raises $105M in Series B Funding

Cultivated meat company Aleph Farms announced today it has completed a $105 million Series B round of funding, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $118 million. The Series B round was led by L Catterton and DisruptAD with participation from Skyviews Life Science, Thai Union, BRF, and CJ CheilJedang. Existing investors VisVires New Protein, Strauss Group, Cargill, Peregrine Ventures, and CPT Capital also participated in the round.

Israel-based Aleph Farms said the new funds will go towards increasing manufacturing, growing operations internationally, and expanding product lines. Currently, the company is developing a cultivated beef steak and will unveil a prototype for that product in November at the Agri-Food Innovation Summit. 

There is of course an enormous difference between unveiling a prototype and making these whole-muscle cuts of cultivated meat at scale. One of the challenges for cultivated meat companies is being able to produce large quantities of product at a cost that is on par with traditional meat. Aleph Farms launched a new production process at the end of 2020 that will eventually be able to reach that price parity, according to the company.

The process is the first part of a phased build-out for Aleph’s forthcoming pilot production facility, which the company says will be operational by 2022. Aleph Farms also plans to do an initial market launch at that time. The Series B funding will, in bigger-picture terms, go towards helping the company realize that goal. 

Aleph’s announcement today follows recent news from other cultivated meat companies that are also opening pilot production facilities and also aiming for commercial launches in 2022. That includes MeaTech 3D, also based in Israel and also developing whole cuts of cultivated meat. Another Israeli company, Future Meat, has already opened its facility and says it plans to sell cultivated meat in the U.S. by 2022.

Before anyone sells anything, however, these companies must get regulatory approval for each market they want to enter. So far, just one company, Eat Just, has regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat, and that’s only in Singapore. Along with price parity, getting regulatory approval is a major topic in the cultivated meat conversation these days. 

Aleph Farms says it is working with regulatory agencies, though the company did not specify for which markets. Part of the company’s international expansion will be to the United Arab Emirates and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Aleph said it is also evaluating the possibility of a manufacturing facility located in the UAE.

MeaTech Says It Will Develop Cultured Pork Products

Israel-based alt-protein company MeaTech 3D has begun research and development activities around cultivated pork, the company announced today. 

Initial activities will focus largely on developing porcine cell lines, which the company says could expand its number of potential addressable markets since pork is the most widely consumed meat in the world. The porcine cell lines will add to MeaTech’s existing cell ag efforts, including cell lines for beef and chicken.

In May of this year, the company announced plans for a pilot production facility that will first be used to increase the production of its cultured fat product and then go on to produce entire cuts of cultivated meat using the company’s 3D bioprinting technology. 

Cell lines are a crucial step in the process of making cultivated meat, since cells are the starting inputs for any eventual product. However, creating new cell lines is an expensive and time-consuming process, and researchers are still figuring out which types of cells are best suited for the kind of large-scale manufacturing most cultured meat companies are aspiring to eventually do.

Most of those companies so far have stuck to developing cultured beef or chicken products, not pork. Despite the latter being the world’s most most popular meat, a very small handful of companies is actually focused on that particular protein right now. Future Meat Technologies, also based in Israel, says its newly opened production facility is producing cultured pork. Dutch startup Meatable, New Age Meats, and Higher Steaks have also done pork prototypes during the last few years. 

MeaTech’s specific focus on cell line development will further set it apart from the masses as more companies announce plans to explore cultured pork products in the future.

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.

Japan’s CulNet Consortium, an ‘Open Innovation Platform’ for Cell-Based Meat, Officially Launches

Last week a group of Japan-based companies announced the official launch of the CulNet Consortium, an open innovation platform for the development of cell-cultured meat in Japan and beyond. The announcement, made by Japan cell-based meat startup IntegriCulture, details the member companies and outlines the activities of the group.

The group’s platform is centered around an open innovation framework developed by IntegriCulture, one of Japan’s most visible and active startups in cellular agriculture. The Uni-CulNet framework and the Consortium plans were originally announced in May of 2020, when IntegriCulture described the framework as “a standardized cellular agriculture infrastructure” that “rapidly establishes the foundation for democratized cellular agriculture.”

The consortium’s member companies plan to cooperate across five different areas to help accelerate the sector’s overall advancement: cell source, culture medium, CulNet hardware, product bioreactor, and product processing.

From the release:

  • Standardized culture media: Recipes that are fundamentally different from the existing media (basal media). Basal media are the raw material for all cultured cell products, and a different type is required for each kind (food, material, medical, etc.).
  • CulNet SystemTM hardware: Hardware that lets people use the CulNet SystemTM across a broad spectrum of uses, whether it’s in mass production or just at home.
  • Product bioreactors: Bioreactors that are used to make things like the products’ edible parts. We estimate that a variety of animals used as agricultural products will be a source for the cells.
  • Cell product processing: The process control that is needed to meet the products’ processing and safety requirements (cell components and culture supernatant).
  • Cell sources: The process that is used to extract and culture cells from livestock and fishery resources and the systems that enable the whole sequence of processes to be completed right where the cell sources are produced—tailoring them to their intended use, source animal species, etc.

It’s not surprising IntegriCulture and its founder Yuki Hanyu are a driving force behind a standardization push around open innovation. Hanyu has been the most visible evangelist for cell-based meat in Japan over the last few years, and his company’s ethos for open innovation was signaled by the efforts he put into building a DIY cultured meat initiative with the Shojinmeat project.

The CulNet Consortium isn’t the only industry organization gaining momentum as the cell-based meat industry matures. The Alliance for Meat, Poultry & Seafood Innovation (AMPS Innovation), an industry group focused on market education and industry advocacy, just announced an eighth member, Orbillion Bio, who joins Eat Just, Upside and Blue Nalu, among others. AMPS has been working to influence US policy to support the cultured meat industry, including a recent joint industry letter to the FDA after its call for input into the labeling framework for cell-based meat.

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.

South Korea: Seawith Uses Algae for Serum and Scaffolding in Cultured Meat

It’s been a banner year so far for cultured meat. In addition to all of the funding that’s been flowing into the space since the start of 2021, there is also a growing number of startups from around the world attacking the issues of creating cell-based meat in unique ways.

The latest such startup to come to our attention is South Korea’s Seawith, which is leveraging algae to differentiate itself from other cultured meat players. The company uses algae to replace the fetal bovine serum (FBS) that has historically been used as a growth medium for cells. FBS is expensive and controversial, so most cell-based meat startups we cover are developing technologies that don’t require it. But Seawith is also using algae as a scaffolding to grow meat, which the company says yields thicker “cuts” of meat.

Following is a brief Q&A conducted via email with Heejae Lee, CTO of Seawith, who provides a little more insight into the company and what it is creating. Answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

1.) What makes Seawith different from other cell-based meat companies?
Seawith has the distinction of making the world’s first perfect steak at a price similar to slaughter meat. Based on algae engineering technology, it has replaced most of the bovine serum, which accounts for more than 90 percent of the cost of culturing meat, and the cell culture scaffold technology can make cultured meat thicker than 1cm.

2.) What makes algae so useful in creating cell-based meat?
The key principle of cultured meat is that one muscle cell takes nutrients and synthesizes them to make large meat. Algae is rich enough to be used as a nutritional supplement, which allows efficient cell culture by supplying it to cells. Also, algae are one of the most abundant resources on Earth, and they have the advantage of being cheap and available everywhere because they can grow anywhere with water and sunlight.

3.) Where are you at with your product right now?
We just finished our research and held a cultured meat tasting event. Cultured meat made with Korean bovine cells was evaluated well by attendees, who said it had the taste and aroma of beef, and the texture of meat could be seen. Currently, it is a muscle-only culture, but we are preparing various features such as taste of fat cells. We are preparing to get permission to produce enough to supply large quantities of products to restaurants by 2023.

4.) What types of cell-based meat will you be creating?
Seawith is making beef steak. There are many different types of meat, but the reason why we are making
difficult steaks is that only the technology we have can implement them. After perfecting the texture of muscle tissue, we plan to develop various meat products such as chicken, pig, and fish as well as meat products and animal feed.

5.) What is your timeline to bring your product to market?
We are currently discussing with the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety to make a trial sale in Korea with the aim of
launching a restaurant at the end of 2022. To this end, we are planning an urban cultured meat factory and will introduce a minimum production model by 2021. From 2023, we are preparing for local tasting event and product launch in different locations such as North America and Singapore.