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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cultured Meat

Tasting Cultivated Seafood in London’s East-end

In London’s East End, a food revolution is bubbling – a high-tech movement promising to change our way of life. Although still in its infancy, with significant early-stage obstacles to overcome, it could become the biggest agricultural disruptor since the advent of farming. I’m talking about cellular agriculture – meat, fish, milk, proteins, and fats – grown in bioreactors, rather than in farmyards.

Recently, I was invited to try it for myself, and I was keen to give it a go. 

The invitation read, “We would like to invite you to an intimate tasting experience hosted by Umami Bioworks (Umami).” It continued, “At this tasting, you will have the opportunity to sample two of our signature product categories: Cultivated White Fish — prepared in a classic fish & chips style. Cultivated Caviar — traditionally presented to highlight its sensory experience.”

Umami is a Singapore-based cultivated seafood company with offices in Japan, the USA, and Europe. It’s applying for approval to sell cultivated fish in several jurisdictions, including the UK, South Korea, the USA, and Singapore. Umami is partnering with Nestle Purina in line with its ambition to launch a tuna-flavoured pet food in the UK.

On 28th May this year, Wildtype’s salmon became the first cultivated seafood to be made available to consumers anywhere in the world , having received approval from the FDA, and the third cultivated protein to enter the US market. But because Umami doesn’t yet have regulatory approval, tastings of its cultivated seafood are by invitation only. 

Twelve of us were seated at the table in the trendy East London basement kitchen, which gleamed with polished utensils, pans, and white tiles, and unsurprisingly smelled of cooking fish. The director of food science, Dr Lou Kutzler, was in the kitchen overseeing the cooking process, which, he assured us, was just like cooking any normal piece of fish fillet.

Having verbally agreed that we had no allergies, we signed a consent form. The same document outlined the purpose of the tasting, which was “to assess the sensory properties and overall product acceptability of cell-cultivated seafood products prior to their market launch.”   

We grilled the CEO, Mihir Pershad, and Dr Lou Kutzler as we awaited our first dish – about cell lines, flavours, and ingredients. Mihir answered with cautious frankness. Although he was unable to tell us what the scaffold was, what the hybrid sections of the dish consisted of, nor what percentage of the fillet was cultivated, he did try to answer our questions, and seemed genuinely interested to know what we thought of the food.

Beer Battered Cultivated Fish Fillet

The fish was cooked in beer batter and arranged delicately on the plate, alongside a block of sculpted chips, some red cabbage, and a dollop of tartar sauce. As I bit into the fish, a shiver washed over my back and face – perhaps it was the momentousness of the event itself, or maybe it was a sense of trepidation. After all, I was about to eat something which very few people in the world had ever tried – and which hadn’t been approved for consumption anywhere. And what’s more, because we knew little about its contents we were eating it blind, on trust.

So how did it taste?

Beer Battered Cultivated Fish Fillet

Beer Battered Cultivated Fish Fillet

The product tasted just like fish. It looked and smelled like fish, too. The texture and mouth-feel, however, was slightly off the mark – a little harder and more jelly-like – not as flaky as white fish should normally be. Lou assured us that the texture and mouth-feel could be resolved at the production stage. I’ve heard this critique before from people who have tasted the chicken equivalent, in the USA and Singapore – the mouth-feel dilemma.

The market for seafood, in the UK alone, was worth £10 billion in 2023, according to the Marine Management Organisation, and worldwide the numbers are enormous. Cultivated fish has been listed by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as a potential solution to currently damaging fishing practices, and to the massive depletion in stock, especially tuna. WWF reported that bluefin tuna have “been overfished to near extinction globally, and if not managed effectively, the world’s tuna fisheries face an ecological disaster.” Umami recently announced a cultivated tuna co-development partnership with Japanese company Maruha Nichiro , the world’s biggest seafood company and a leading supplier of tuna.

Back in central London, where one cultivated fish product would have been plenty for our adventurous palettes, we were being served up a second helping of cell-grown caviar. We had been briefed that the dish was a top-end, Beluga-like caviar product – a more subtle tasting, creamier and less fishy caviar than others. We were told Beluga caviar melts in your mouth, rather than bursts like the cheaper variety. It was served with sour cream on blinis, arranged delicately on a fancy spoon. Since none of us had tasted Beluga, we all agreed the cultivated caviar didn’t live up (or down) to our experiences – it had less flavour and the consistency was more soluble. Unfortunately, the sour cream and blini somewhat overpowered it. Perhaps we weren’t the right people to appreciate the product given our inexperienced tastes. 

Cell-Cultivated Caviar

Cultivated caviar seems, at least price-wise, like a sensible product to launch, as cultivated foods will (at least in the early days) be sold at a premium, until scale-up brings the price down. But I couldn’t help wondering whether the appeal of this luxury caviar, to those wealthy individuals able to afford it, is at least in part the way it’s sourced. Would cultivating it reduce the requisite exotic appeal? However, we were assured by Mihir that a growing popularity amongst Gen Z is a potentially encouraging market. 

Singapore was the first to approve the sale of cultivated meat back in 2020, followed in the USA in 2022 for Upside Food and Good Meat, and last year for Mission Barn’s cultivated fats. Also last year, Aleph Farms received approval from Israeli regulator to sell cultivated beef, and in the same year, the UK became the first in the world to approve the sale of cultivated meat for pets, for company Meatly. Other UK cultivated meat companies are awaiting approval from the FSA, including Ivy Farm and Hoxton Farms – developing beef fats. 

Cultivated meat and dairy companies face significant headwinds regarding capital funding, a largely negative media, and regulatory hurdles, but there are signs of encouragement from governments who see it as a net zero contributor. The UK is fast becoming a frontrunner in Europe with initiatives like the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub and the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein. Last year also saw the opening of the £38 million National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC) which works to advance research and innovation in areas like cultured meat, plant-based proteins, insect-based proteins, and fermented proteins, derived from sources other than animals. In addition, the FSA sandbox programme was also launched last year, and invited 8 companies, including BluNalu, Most Meat, Vow, Gourmey, and Hoxton Farms, to help inform and develop a robust system of regulation for cultivated novel foods. 

Following the event on City Road, I said goodbye to my fellow tasters and headed to the HYLO Building, in EC1. It was just 10 minutes on foot and is home to Hoxton Farms. There, I met with, CEO, co-founder (and former Future of Foods Interviews guest) Max Jamilly, who had agreed to give me a tour. 

Max Jamilly – Co-Founder Hoxton Farms

Jamilly is a scientist and a businessman, with a PhD in Synthetic Biology from the University of Oxford and two master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge in biotechnology and business. He has a background in venture capital, which almost certainly assisted Hoxton Farms in raising an impressive $35 million in funding. Though significant, this is a fraction compared to the heady days of 2020 when the likes of Mosa Meat and Good Meat were raising hundreds of millions. 2024 saw record-low levels of venture capital investment in this space, so to secure this sum is impressive for Hoxton. Jamilly assured me that he isn’t fazed by the current lack of investment in the industry and expects a turnaround. 

The scale of the project is very impressive, and much of what happens inside is commercially and technically sensitive, hidden from external view by a privacy glass façade. I was allowed one photograph outside the lab, then I was decked out in laboratory gear – hat and gown, shoe coverings and gloves, and led from the wide open-plan offices into the technical guts of the building. It was made clear that any contamination would be catastrophic, destroying entire batches, so although the air filtration system worked almost unnoticed in the background, it was described to me as one of the most impressive parts of the whole set up. I was taken into the laboratory and given a brief explanation of the process, shown the old bioreactors and the new ones, and introduced to the engineers who were building them on site. I was shown the kitchen area where the cultivated fats were being turned into products by an in-house chef, Josh Hatfield. 

Hoxton Farm’s next move, according to Jamilly, is a new facility in Singapore where their regulatory application is ongoing. According to Jamilly, having a facility in Singapore makes things easier for the Singapore regulators to do their inspections and examinations, but also allows Hoxton Farms to produce it’s cultivated beef fats locally for sale, not just for Singapore but eventually into the wider Asia market. 

Research carried out internally by cultivated meat company, Aleph Farms, indicates that acceptance of cultivated meat is significantly more positive in Asia than in the west. Perhaps recent events in the USA have also added to this fresh eastern-promise. And Singapore appears to be ahead of the game, not just because it has a well established, globally respected Novel Food Regulatory Framework, and is selling cultivated meat into retail, but also because it’s been perceived by global companies as a gateway into Asia. It’s generally accepted that getting approval in Singapore could be persuasive with other countries in the region, when it comes to regulation. But it appears to be a two way street, because as western companies like Hoxton Farms look to Singapore and Asia for a market – so too are those Asian companies such as Umami Bioworks, being drawn to the UK, which could also become a significant player.

Alex Crisp is a writer, podcaster, and facilitator – host of Future of Foods Interviews.

Tasting Cultivated Seafood in London’s East-end

In London’s East End a food revolution is bubbling – a high-tech movement promising to change our way of life. Though in its infancy, with significant early stage obstacles to overcome, could become the biggest agricultural disruptor since farming began. I’m talking about cellular agriculture – meat, fish, milk, proteins, and fats – grown in bioreactors, rather than in farmyards.

Recently, I was invited to try it for myself, and I was keen to give it a go. 

The invitation read, “We would like to invite you to an intimate tasting experience hosted by Umami Bioworks (Umami).” It continued, “At this tasting, you will have the opportunity to sample two of our signature product categories: Cultivated White Fish — prepared in a classic fish & chips style. Cultivated Caviar — traditionally presented to highlight its sensory experience.”

Umami is a Singapore-based cultivated seafood company with offices in Japan, the USA, and Europe. It’s applying for approval to sell cultivated fish in several jurisdictions, including the UK, South Korea, the USA, and Singapore. Umami is partnering with Nestle Purina in line with its ambition to launch a tuna-flavoured pet food in the UK.

On 28th May this year, Wildtype’s salmon became the first cultivated seafood to be made available to consumers anywhere in the world , having received approval from the FDA, and the third cultivated protein to enter the US market. But because Umami doesn’t yet have regulatory approval, tastings of its cultivated seafood are by invitation only. 

Twelve of us were seated at the table in the trendy East London basement kitchen, which gleamed with polished utensils, pans, and white tiles, and unsurprisingly smelled of cooking fish. The director of food science, Dr Lou Kutzler, was in the kitchen overseeing the cooking process, which, he assured us, was just like cooking any normal piece of fish fillet.

Having verbally agreed that we had no allergies, we signed a consent form. The same document outlined the purpose of the tasting, which was “to assess the sensory properties and overall product acceptability of cell-cultivated seafood products prior to their market launch.”   

We grilled the CEO, Mihir Pershad, and Dr Lou Kutzler as we awaited our first dish – about cell lines, flavours, and ingredients. Mihir answered with cautious frankness. Although he was unable to tell us what the scaffold was, what the hybrid sections of the dish consisted of, nor what percentage of the fillet was cultivated, he did try to answer our questions, and seemed genuinely interested to know what we thought of the food.

Beer Battered Cultivated Fish Fillet

The fish was cooked in beer batter and arranged delicately on the plate, alongside a block of sculpted chips, some red cabbage, and a dollop of tartar sauce. As I bit into the fish, a shiver washed over my back and face – perhaps it was the momentousness of the event itself, or maybe it was a sense of trepidation. After all, I was about to eat something which very few people in the world had ever tried – and which hadn’t been approved for consumption anywhere. And what’s more, because we knew little about its contents we were eating it blind, on trust.

So how did it taste?

The product tasted just like fish. It looked and smelled like fish, too. The texture and mouth-feel, however, was slightly off the mark – a little harder and more jelly-like – not as flaky as white fish should normally be. Lou assured us that the texture and mouth-feel could be resolved at the production stage. I’ve heard this critique before from people who have tasted the chicken equivalent, in the USA and Singapore – the mouth-feel dilemma.

The market for seafood, in the UK alone, was worth £10 billion in 2023, according to the Marine Management Organisation, and worldwide the numbers are enormous. Cultivated fish has been listed by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as a potential solution to currently damaging fishing practices, and to the massive depletion in stock, especially tuna. WWF reported that bluefin tuna have “been overfished to near extinction globally, and if not managed effectively, the world’s tuna fisheries face an ecological disaster.” Umami recently announced a cultivated tuna co-development partnership with Japanese company Maruha Nichiro , the world’s biggest seafood company and a leading supplier of tuna.

Back in central London, where one cultivated fish product would have been plenty for our adventurous palettes, we were being served up a second helping, of cell-grown caviar. We had been briefed that the dish was a top-end, Beluga-like caviar product – a more subtle tasting, creamier and less fishy caviar than others. We were told Beluga caviar melts in your mouth, rather than bursts like the cheaper variety. It was served with sour cream on blinis, arranged delicately on a fancy spoon. Since none of us had tasted Beluga, we all agreed the cultivated caviar didn’t live up (or down) to our experiences – it had less flavour and the consistency was more soluble. Unfortunately, the sour cream and blini somewhat overpowered it. Perhaps we weren’t the right people to appreciate the product given our inexperienced tastes. 

Cell Cultivated Caviar

Cultivated caviar seems, at least price-wise, like a sensible product to launch, as cultivated foods will (at least in the early days) be sold at a premium, until scale-up brings the price down. But I couldn’t help wondering whether the appeal of this luxury caviar, to those wealthy individuals able to afford it, is at least in part the way it’s sourced. Would cultivating it reduce the requisite exotic appeal? However, we were assured by Mihir that a growing popularity amongst Gen Z is a potentially encouraging market. 

Singapore was the first to approve the sale of cultivated meat back in 2020, followed in the USA in 2022 for Upside Food and Good Meat, and last year for Mission Barn’s cultivated fats. Also last year, Aleph Farms received approval from Israeli regulator to sell cultivated beef, and in the same year, the UK became the first in the world to approve the sale of cultivated meat for pets, for company Meatly. Other UK cultivated meat companies are awaiting approval from the FSA, including Ivy Farm and Hoxton Farms – developing beef fats. 

Cultivated meat and dairy companies face significant headwinds regarding capital funding, a largely negative media, and regulatory hurdles, but there are signs of encouragement from governments who see it as a net zero contributor. The UK is fast becoming a frontrunner in Europe with initiatives like the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub and the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein. Last year also saw the opening of the £38 million National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC) which works to advance research and innovation in areas like cultured meat, plant-based proteins, insect-based proteins, and fermented proteins, derived from sources other than animals. In addition, the FSA sandbox programme was also launched last year, and invited 8 companies, including BluNalu, Most Meat, Vow, Gourmey, and Hoxton Farms, to help inform and develop a robust system of regulation for cultivated novel foods. 

Following the event on City Road, I said goodbye to my fellow tasters and headed to the HYLO Building, in EC1. It was just 10 minutes on foot and is home to Hoxton Farms. There, I met with, CEO, co-founder (and former Future of Foods Interviews guest) Max Jamilly, who had agreed to give me a tour. 

Max Jamilly – Co-Founder Hoxton Farms

Jamilly is a scientist and a businessman, with a PhD in Synthetic Biology from the University of Oxford and two master’s degrees from the University of Cambridge in biotechnology and business. He has a background in venture capital, which almost certainly assisted Hoxton Farms in raising an impressive $35 million in funding. Though significant, this is a fraction compared to the heady days of 2020 when the likes of Mosa Meat and Good Meat were raising hundreds of millions. 2024 saw record-low levels of venture capital investment in this space, so to secure this sum is impressive for Hoxton. Jamilly assured me that he isn’t fazed by the current lack of investment in the industry and expects a turnaround. 

The scale of the project is very impressive, and much of what happens inside is commercially and technically sensitive, hidden from external view by a privacy glass façade. I was allowed one photograph outside the lab, then I was decked out in laboratory gear – hat and gown, shoe coverings and gloves, and led from the wide open-plan offices into the technical guts of the building. It was made clear that any contamination would be catastrophic, destroying entire batches, so although the air filtration system worked almost unnoticed in the background, it was described to me as one of the most impressive parts of the whole set up. I was taken into the laboratory and given a brief explanation of the process, shown the old bioreactors and the new ones, and introduced to the engineers who were building them on site. I was shown the kitchen area where the cultivated fats were being turned into products by an in house chef, Josh Hatfield. 

Hoxton Farm’s next move, according to Jamilly, is a new facility in Singapore where their regulatory application is ongoing. According to Jamilly, having a facility in Singapore makes things easier for the Singapore regulators to do their inspections and examinations, but also allows Hoxton Farms to produce it’s cultivated beef fats locally for sale, not just for Singapore but eventually into the wider Asia market. 

Research carried out internally by cultivated meat company, Aleph Farms, indicates that acceptance of cultivated meat is significantly more positive in Asia than in the west. Perhaps recent events in the USA have also added to this fresh eastern-promise. And Singapore appears to be ahead of the game, not just because it has a well established, globally respected Novel Food Regulatory Framework, and is selling cultivated meat into retail, but also because it’s been perceived by global companies as a gateway into Asia. It’s generally accepted that getting approval in Singapore could be persuasive with other countries in the region, when it comes to regulation. But it appears to be a two way street, because as western companies like Hoxton Farms look to Singapore and Asia for a market – so too are those Asian companies such as Umami Bioworks, being drawn to the UK, which could also become a significant player.

Alex Crisp is a writer, podcaster and facilitator – host of Future of Foods Interviews.

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.

A Conversation With BioCraft On Building an AI to Accelerate Cultured Meat Development

Over the past few years, companies in food tech product development have begun to utilize machine learning and other AI techniques to accelerate the development of their products. One of those companies is Biocraft, a company focused on developing pet food utilizing cultured meat as its primary protein input.

The company announced in May they would focus exclusively on B2B (they had previously been developing a consumer-facing product under the brand Because Animals), and this week started talking about how they are utilizing AI to assist in product development.

I sat down with Biocraft CEO Shannon Falconer and AI lead Chai Molina to learn more about the company’s AI and the future direction of the company.

Tell us why you decided to investigate how AI could help you develop cultivated meat.

Falconer: My background is my PhD is in biochemistry, and so mostly I was working on drug discovery and antibiotic research. And you know, when AI really hit the pharmaceutical industry in a meaningful way about a decade ago, it dropped the time and the cost of bringing a drug to market, so I’ve been very bullish on integrating this technology into what we’re doing for cultured meat.

I asked Chai if there are any types of tools that are available or that could work for us to actually do what we want to help in dropping our costs, and getting the right ingredient and nutritional profile of our products. Chai looked around and said, “No, there is not.” And so it was then really that we decided if there’s nothing available that we can purchase and use, then we’ve just got to build this ourselves.

Molina: I come to this with a view that this is a mathematical problem, that we just have to find the connections between kind of modeling out how human reasoning sort of works and connecting the dots between pieces of machinery in the cell. To try to understand how we can tweak this Rube Goldberg machine. How we can push it into the direction that we want it to go.

How did you start building the AI model?

Molina: There’s a machine learning component that is along the lines of natural language processing, where we collect our data from lots of publicly available papers and databases. From there, we process the data and basically build out a picture of the machinery inside the cell.

What do you mean by that?

Molina: These databases and papers might show a tiny glimpse of one piece of that machinery inside a cell. In a way, we’re superimposing little pictures and little parts of that machinery to build out the bigger picture. From there, we try to understand if you pull this cable or take this step, what’s it gonna do? There are all these threads of biochemistry in the cell, I like to think of it like dominoes where you push one, and then you see downstream effects. And so that is more of a mathematical modeling approach, involving network theory.

You’re using the analogy of a machine to describe a cell and understand what the domino effects of a certain action or input within a given hypothesis about that cell.

Molina: Yes. Once we have a picture of the machinery in the cell, it’s like, okay, ‘what can we how can we tweak that to make it do what we want?’ Say we want to add a novel medium component for a growth serum for the cells that will hopefully push them in the direction that we want, such as cell proliferation. So, for example, we look at different substances that are safe for consumption and ask how would the addition of these things at least qualitatively impacts the machinery in the cell.

And you’re running these hypotheses in the AI and then testing out promising results in a wet lab?

Falconer: If you’re a wet lab scientist, and you generate a hypothesis, there are so many things to test. Especially when you’re working on something as complicated as media optimization in order to achieve the right cocktail that will elicit proliferation as well as the nutritional profile that you are that you want that you desire. And so the time that it would take to perform all these various experiments empirically, not only of course, is very lengthy and very expensive. And so what this tool does is it allows us to trim down that list of experiments. This tool is able to prioritize for us and give us sort of a ranking order as to which hypotheses are more likely to succeed or fail. And so this shortens the time and the number of experiments.

And then and then the other thing that it does for us is, it allows us to actually get better at identifying sort of the unknowns. What this tool can do is it can identify, say, anywhere between, say, A and Z -anywhere along this line where a human brain cannot read and put into place all of the different connections – what might ultimately elicit the end desired effect. We can then go back and say, Oh, but we now know that five nodes upstream in these completely disconnected papers, we see that this domino will hit this one, and then this one hits this one, etc. And then we can actually achieve this desired effect down the road.

You announced last May you were becoming a B2B company exclusively, and you were sunsetting your CPG products. How has this new focus, combined with the AI development tool, changed your product development speed?

Falconer: Yes, so now we’re exclusively a b2b company, focused on delivering volumes and working with existing pet food manufacturers who already have that massive consumer base and who can disseminate product quickly as soon as we have it available to sell it. And so that’s what we’re focused on right now. I’d say over the past 12 months, with just focusing on this product development. I think we’ve made probably more progress in 12 months than we did in five years. And a big part of that is the development of our AI platform.

If you’d like to learn more about how AI is accelerating next-generation food development, join us October 25th at the Food AI Summit.

Survey: Parasite & Mercury-Free Fish Are Key Attributes of Cell-Cultured Seafood According to Sushi Eaters

According to a report published by cell-cultured seafood startup BluNalu, consumers value the absence of parasites and mercury in cell-cultured seafood, especially among those who frequently eat sushi. The data, sourced from a survey conducted by a market research specialist in 2022 and featured in a comprehensive report by BluNalu this week, displays how consumers prioritize specific qualities of cell-cultured seafood, like BluNalu’s toro tuna.

The survey chart below reveals the answer to the question: “How significant are the following benefits of cell-cultured seafood when deciding whether to order it in a restaurant?” The top four attributes, as ranked by sushi enthusiasts, all pertained to the “clean” attributes of food cultivated beyond our increasingly polluted and climate-affected oceans. The importance placed on seafood being free from parasites, pesticides, mercury, and microplastics suggests the kind of narratives companies like BluNalu should adopt when introducing their products to the market.

Other interesting insights from the BluNalu research compilation include a preference among chefs and food industry experts for the toro portion of the tuna – the fatty belly portion of the fish – when asked which type of fish and part of a fish that the company should emphasize when created a cell-cultured alternative to wild-caught fish. This desire for toro, according to BluNalu, is because chefs see an opportunity to present this premium cut to a wider audience. From the report:

Another intriguing insight from the BluNalu research is the preference among chefs and food industry experts for toro, the fatty belly region of tune. When inquired about which fish type and section the company should highlight when producing a cell-cultured alternative to wild-caught fish, most leaned towards the toro. BluNalu believes this is because chefs see an opportunity to offer this high-priced cut to a wider audience. From the report:

Discussions with chefs illuminated the opportunity presented by cell-cultured bluefin tuna toro to extend menu utilization in non-Japanese fine-dining restaurants for the first time at scale, given that 80% of the world’s supply of this fish has historically been consumed in Japan.

While it’s worth noting the while research in the report is obviously self-serving, the insights and data seem to ring true. Like many, I’ve become increasingly worried about the potential for toxins when eating seafood over the past few years, and I’d be interested in eating seafood that doesn’t have exposure to chemicals, parasites, and other contaminants of seafood pulled from the sea. And like many in the food tech world, I’m also interested in eating less seafood due to the threat to the seafood population from overfishing.

If you’d like to take a look at the full report, you can find it here on BluNalu’s website.

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.

Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Roee Nir, CEO and Cofounder of Forsea

I had the opportunity to talk to Roee Nir, CEO and co-founder of Forsea. Forsea is producing cultivated seafood, starting with cultivated eel. Prior to Forsea, Nir headed the business development for a biopharmaceutical company in immunology. We chatted about the differences between cultivated meat and cultivated seafood, customer preferences, navigating the regulatory environment, the foodtech ecosystem in Israel, and how startups raise money in Israel. 

J: Why is eel your first product?

R: We start with eel because our strategy is to target highly priced fish with real market demand that is unmet and endangered species. The place that we go to look for the endangered species is the IUCN Red List and eel was answering these criteria quite significantly because eel has declined 90 to 95% in recent decades and the wholesale price is between 60 to $75 per kilo. Just to understand how big the market need is, Japan, for example, consumed about 160,000 metric tons in the year 2000. Now, they consume around 14. So, there is a big gap between the demand and the current supply and for us that was a no brainer to tackle this market.

J: How did you as a founder become passionate about this problem? 

R: We are in the center of a revolution. Looking at fish and seafood, the demand for them is expected to double by 2050. Already now, less than 7% of the fisheries are being fished at levels below sustainability. Aquaculture has its own environmental and food security issues. There is a great need to close the supply and demand gap.

J: Israel is very strong and cultivated meat, especially because there are a lot of people that don’t eat meat here. How do you see differences in the development of cultivated meat vs. cultivated seafood startups? 

R: Cultivated meat had some background from medical research related to tissue engineering and organ substitutes and so on. The challenge was taking it from that vertical into the right applications in the food. For fish, there was no research and every cultivated fish and seafood company is doing very basic research because the cells develop differently. Each of us is more or less targeting different markets at the beginning (tuna, scallops, shrimp, etc) which require their own modifications. There are some ancillary companies joining the ecosystem related to cell line development, scaffolding, growth factor developments, contract manufacturing, piloting, etc for cultivated meat.

J: So when the Kitchen came to you and approached you with the idea of this startup, and they already had the technology, what was that technology based on? 

R: We are a completely different company than any other cultivated company. Almost all cultivated meat companies do more or less the same thing, they will go to a certain source of stem cells and use a technique called directed differentiation to grow the cells. Then the cells have to communicate which they do by using a scaffold where the cells are seated on the scaffold pre-maturation. This is used as a building block of the tissue.

What my co-founder Iftach Nachman discovered is a technique to take important stem cells which are cells that have the potential to differentiate to any type of cell. And these are usually being created only when you have a fertilized egg. So you have a fertilized egg that doubles to two to four to eight, and so on. These cells upload but they have the potential to differentiate to any type of a cell. He found a technique to take these cells and to aggregate them into a special form called an organoid and give these stem cells the feeling that they are in the early stage of their own development. What happens is that these cells start to grow as if they weren’t each. They grow into many tissues that are naturally composed of edible pieces. 

So we barely use growth factors. We do use some growth factor to direct this organoid tissue to have the composition that we want, but it’s a very minimal usage compared to the directed differentiation methodology. Then these many tissues of this organ start to develop autonomously up to less than a millimeter before we start building tissue from it. 

And by this method, we are tackling the largest challenges of the cultivated meat space. We eliminate the scaffolding stage because each one of these organoids is its own connective tissue. They communicate together and we don’t need to synthetically put them on a scaffold. We also simplify the production process so we are much more scalable. These advantages allow us to bring our product to plate faster and reach price parity faster. Also, the tissue is more natural in the way that we manufacture the cut.

J: When do you expect that consumers will be able to try your seafood? 

R: We are in the R&D phase and are planning to launch the first product to market at the end of 2025. 

J: When a new product enters the market here in Israel, especially food tech, what kind of adjustments do you have to make toward customer preferences? 

R: The final product that we launch will probably be more suitable for the Asian territories. As a company for our product of eel, we would want to do the market adaptations in Japan, not in Israel. I think that overall most companies are going to try Israel or Singapore as a test country but we are all aiming at selling globally. Because our industry is an industry that requires a lot of CapEx and we need markets that justify such an investment. Our vision is that our first launch would be in Asia.

J: With this product, what kind of regulation or intellectual property protection challenges do you have to navigate? 

R: The first wave of companies has to face two aspects. One is regulation, and the other is market education. The way is being paved by them for us. Any company that is getting the approval, it’s a very big advancement. I’m quite confident that our process will go through there quite smoothly as any cultivated meat company. From an IP perspective, everything that we do is completely innovative. We are submitting a few provisionals these days, based on the research that we generated in our lab. But really everything that we do is very innovative and this is how we protect ourselves. 

J: There are probably a lot of challenges as a first mover entering the market, especially around customer reception. What are the other challenges associated with developing not just a technology, but also a business that has to have customers? 

R: First, every consumer research that has been done says that the most important thing in the product is taste. So it’s on us to deliver a product that is high quality. From a market perspective, we, as a company, do not plan to be the ones that are marketing the product. For example, now we are looking for strong partners in the different territories that we target to partner with to make the right market adaptations to the target market. And also such companies which are seafood manufacturers and seafood traders that already have their own relationships with the restaurants and the retail stores. They will be the ones that will take the path of introducing the product into the market. That’s our strategy. Specifically with the eel, more than 80% of it is being sold in restaurants and that’s also our strategy: to start with the restaurants and then expand to the stores. 

J: Are there any other food tech companies from Israel or from other places that you really admire for their innovation or their business strategy? 

R: I think that Aleph is doing amazing work. I love their strategy. I love their technology and I think that it’s very well managed. I love the technology of Imagindairy also, they have very deep technology for the milk space. Also mushfoods, it’s a hamburger that’s 50/50. 

J: It sounds like the startup ecosystem here within food tech is very well connected. Would you say that the ecosystem here is generally a very close-knit and supportive community? 

R: First of all, in cultivated meat, no one needs to speak now on competition. Even the ones that are very soon going to launch their products, the market is still big and everyone is still starting. Everyone should collaborate in order to help us all bring this industry up, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the IP of others. 

As part of the larger ecosystem in Israel, we all collaborate. We are Israelis and we are very communicative within ourselves. We like to meet, we like to share ideas, and we love that this is a very central industry that is erupting from Israel. We also share investors. Sharing investors is a very connective thing.

J: And you talked about investors, so what is it like raising money here? 

R: So many of us, certainly all the companies from the Kitchen, have received Israeli Innovation Authority funding. We had to go through a very rigorous application and many meetings and once we were approved to be financed by the Israeli Innovation Authority and by the Kitchen, we were given 3 million shekels ($900,000). And it’s a very smart thing to do from the government’s point of view because it’s their way of incentivizing innovation. Then you have to start raising and from the earlier stages you can probably target angels as well. But most of my investors are Vc’s and only one angel. My preference is either VC’s or CVC’s, professional investors that not only know the business but support additional fundraising in the next stages, networking, etc. There are less investors in Israel than US or Europe so more investors are American or European. But there are also Israeli VC’s that have started to be more interested. 

J: You mention corporate venture capital, is that very common here? 

R: It is a source of funding. Of course, VC’s are more active, and naturally, there are much less CVC’s and their process is much longer and they are more conservative. For the relevant companies, it’s there. There are less investors in Israel than US or Europe, so more investors are from US or Europe.

Joy Chen is a contributor at the Spoon and has been writing about robotics and alternative proteins for the past year and a half. Although originally from the United States, she is currently studying at Tel Aviv University in Tel Aviv, Israel. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From his post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the ride will definitely be bumpy.

Japan Prime Minister Wants to Develop Cultivated Meat Industry To Help Create Sustainable Food Supply

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced plans to start developing Japan’s cellular agriculture industry with the aim of producing cultivated meat and fish, according to a story published today by the Japan news bureau, Nikkei.

“We will develop the environment to create a new market, such as efforts to ensure safety and the establishment of labeling rules, and foster a food tech business originating in Japan,” said Prime Minister Kishida as part of the announcement.

Nikkei reported that Kishida expanded on his plans at a House of Representatives Budget Committee on the same day, telling Nobuhiro Nakayama of the Liberal Democratic Party, “Foodtech, including cellular foods, is an important technology from the perspective of realizing a sustainable food supply. We have to support efforts that contribute to solving the world’s food problems.”

While Japan’s regulatory environment for the sale of cell-cultivated meat has been viewed by some as one that could create a fairly quick glide path as compared to other countries, there are still a few regulatory hurdles that need to be settled for cultivated meat to be sold to consumers. Last year the Japanese Health, Labor, and Welfare Ministry of Japan formed a team of experts to study the safety of cultivated meat and its associated production process. Almost a year later, the Japanese government is still defining what constitutes cultured meat as food and working to develop safety standards for raw materials and manufacturing processes.

Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Katsunobu Kato said, “While paying close attention to the state of research and development, scientific findings on safety, and international trends, we will further consider what measures are necessary in terms of safety.”

Kishida’s focus on developing the cultivated meat industry is an encouraging sign for the numerous startups from the island nation that have been working on developing cultivated meat technology for the past few years. This includes Integriculture, which in 2021 announced the Culnet Consortium, an open innovation platform for the development of cell-cultured meat in Japan and beyond. Japan food conglomerate Ajinomoto is also eager to develop the market, having inked a deal last year with Israel-based cultivated meat startup Supermeat.

The support by Japan’s leading government officials also underscores a trend in which we’ve seen countries with low food sovereignty take a particular interest in new food technologies as a way to increase their self-dependence. Singapore and Israel have been similarly proactive, pushing for investment and accelerated regulatory pathways for sales of cultivated meat.

Here in the US. the path towards government approval of cultivated meat took a big step forward when UPSIDE Foods announced it has become the first company in the world to receive a “No Questions” letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for cultivated meat, poultry, or seafood. All eyes across the globe have been watching the U.S. government’s approval process closely and some believe we will see sales of cultivated meat to consumers sometime this year.

Czech Startup Mewery Makes Cultivated Meat with Microalgae

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

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

Above: Roman Lauš and the Mewery team

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

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

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