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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cultured Meat

3 More Restaurant Biz Predictions for 2021

Even in the best of times (not a pandemic) making industry-wide predictions is kind of a guessing game. After all, anything can happen, a point underscored by the restaurant industry’s COVID-19-induced meltdown followed by a seismic shift to off-premises formats. 

One thing we do know with certainty as we head into the new year is that those off-premises formats — delivery, takeout, drive-thru — are here to stay. So with that in mind, here are a few mini-predictions for 2021 that suggest how restaurants might further adapt to these new formats.

An overwhelming number of virtual restaurants will surface.

Some good news is that practically anyone can start a virtual restaurant brand. Some bad news is that everyone from established restaurants to celebrities to random internet stars is doing just that, quickly saturating the market in the process.

This is likely to increase, especially in the first half of 2021. However, there is a huge difference between launching a chicken wings brand and maintaining a successful, even profitable, concept for the long term. Over the next 12 months, we will learn more about what it takes to achieve the latter. In the process, many, many virtual brands will come and go.

There will be more off-premises options for high-end restaurants.

Full-service, high-end restaurants were hit hardest by the pandemic in 2020, since those experiences have historically relied on the full dining room experience to reach customers. 

But towards the end of 2020, we got a glimpse of how these restaurants might both survive and prosper in a restaurant industry that’s irrevocably shifted to meal formats like delivery and takeout. Lunchbox and C3 launched a virtual food hall for fine dining, and Crave Collective showed us what an entire ghost kitchen operation for such restaurants would look like. 

Rather than try to replicate existing fine-dining experiences in a to-go box, concepts like those of Lunchbox and Crave work with the chefs to imagine new ones that maintain a higher-end feel while being simpler and more travel friendly.

Expect more virtual food halls and ghost kitchens dedicated to higher-end dining to emerge in 2021, and more restaurants to take a chance with these formats. 

Cell-based meat will come to more restaurants. 

At the end of 2020, Singapore-based 1880 became the world’s first restaurant to sell cultured meat via a partnership with Eat Just. The combination restaurant/club/social enterprise threw a launch party for Eat Just’s GOOD Meat cultured chicken and will carry it on the menu in some capacity moving forward.

Restaurants are a logical stop for cell-based meat companies on the road from lab prototype to mainstream staple because they have historically always played a role in consumers’ eating behaviors and patterns. 

Just Eat isn’t the only cell-based meat company currently in restaurants. In Tel Aviv, Israel, Supermeat has its own test kitchen-turned restaurant called The Chicken that invites consumers to dine on cell-based meat in exchange for feedback.

More restaurants around the world will play host similar developments in 2021. 

Matrix Meats, Maker of Alt-Meat Scaffolding Tech, Raises Seed Funding

Matrix Meats, a Columbus, Ohio-based maker of proprietary technology for scaffolding used in the creation of cultured meat, has raised a seed funding round according a press release sent to The Spoon.

The round, the amount of which was not disclosed, was led by Unovis Asset Management and, according to the press release, “further supported by CPT Capital, Siddhi Capital, Clear Current Capital and a special purpose vehicle (SPV) led by the Ikove Startup Nursery Fund.”

Ikove’s participation makes sense, as Matrix was born out of a partnership between Ikove Startup Nursery and Nanofiber Solutions. Nanofiber Solutions is the company which created the original process – called electrospinning – which Matrix Meats uses for its scaffolding tech.

Scaffolding, a critical building block in the creation of cultured meat, is used by cultured meat makers in bioreactors to provide a structure around which cells can replicate as they grow. Scaffolding can be made of synthetic or natural materials like plant-based or collagen. Matrix’s electrospinning technology is flexible and can use a variety of materials.

Here’s how Matrix CTO Jed Johnson described the company’s business back in an interview with the Spoon in the summer:

“It’s like the SaaS model, but instead of software as a service, it’s scaffold as a service,” said Johnson, “And we do that because we’re trying to design custom proprietary scaffold for each partner or each customer. Rather than take something off the shelf, like a cytodex bead, which is a standard microcarrier plastic bead that the pharmaceutical world uses, we’re developing custom scaffolds for for each of our partners. That’s because everyone in the culture meatspace is trying to carve out their sort of niche.”

According to the announcement, Matrix is currently working with 14 cultivated meat makers from seven different countries.

“We believe that our technology is an integral part of allowing the cultivated meat market to mature,” said Matrix Meats CEO Eric Jenkusky in the release. “Our innovative and programmable electro-spun nano-fiber scaffolds which replicate the extra cellular matrix of living organisms is backed by 50 awarded and pending patents. We will be expanding our efforts to assist our client/partners with accelerating their path to market.” 

Restaurants Are Critical to Cultured Meat’s Evolution

This is the Spoon’s weekly restaurant tech wrapup. Sign up today to get the Spoon delivered to your inbox.

This being a newsletter about restaurant tech, I normally spend more time on software and systems than actual food items. Last week, however, the big restaurant tech was the food. 

Eat Just dropped news at the beginning of the week that it had made the world’s first sale of cultured meat (following regulatory approval earlier this month). The buyer? A venue in Singapore called 1880 that’s something of a mix between a restaurant, club, and social enterprise. Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken made its debut at 1880 this past Saturday, Dec. 19, at a launch party.

The news is historic for both Eat Just and cultured meat. But it’s also a major milestone for the restaurant biz, which will play an important role in helping both consumers and regulators understand why we need (underscore that word) to shift to forms of protein that don’t require things like animal slaughter and deforestation to bring into being.

We’ve long known that dropping animal proteins from our food system is one of the most impactful things humans can do when it comes to preserving the planet. More recently, the United Nations pinpointed increased demand for animal protein as a major driver for zoonotic diseases, including COVID-19. It’s hard to summarize the urgency here in a few sentences, but the call to action very clear at this point: change our diets or barrel straight into a future of mass food insecurity, extinct species, regions (including Singapore) completely under water, and the whole collapse of living systems.

The way to express those points is, quite frankly, not through newsletters like this but through culinary experiences that illustrate frightening stuff while simultaneously providing solutions for what could be.

Speaking to me on the phone this week, Eat Just said it chose 1880 as a launch partner because of the venue’s “focus on the future of food” and mission “to build a better planet.” Working together, the two created a menu for the launch of GOOD that essentially brings to life the urgency around finding more sustainable sources of protein.

About 40 people were invited to a four-course meal designed to be a history of our food system, from foraging to farming to melting icecaps. According to materials sent by Eat Just, “Each of course represent[s] an element of the story told through the life of the red junglefowl, the wild ancestor of domesticated chickens, which is found throughout Southeast Asia and is on the ‘endangered’ list in the Red Data Book, an anthology of Singapore natural heritage.” Providing a culinary representation of what the future could be if we stopped relying on animal protein, the meal culminated with three cultured chicken dishes, each one influenced by a top chicken-producing country: Brazil, China, and the U.S.

Importantly, Eat Just’s cultured chicken will also be available for purchase on 1880’s menu moving forward. (Attendees paid for the fourth course cultured chicken dish at the launch, too.) Even more important, the cost of a cultured chicken dish at 1880 will be around $23 USD, which is on par with regular chicken dishes at that venue and at most other upscale restaurants The feasible price point is huge, since reaching price parity with traditional meat is a major requirement for the evolution of cell-based meat from prototype to dietary staple.

Restaurants are essential when it comes to providing (relatively affordable) experiences with cultured meat because they have historically always played a role in the evolution of the what we eat. Consider the hamburger. As a food item, it’s older than the United States by centuries. But it wasn’t until White Castle opened in 1921 and introduced the world to “the slider” that the burger started down the path to ubiquity and eventually became a standard of diets around the world.

That evolution took the better part of a century, which is to say that cultured meat will not come to White Caste or any other QSR tomorrow. It might not even hit those mainstream outlets next year. But as more cultured meat companies like Eat Just gain regulatory approval and provide culinary experiences and education, more consumers, governments, and food producers will start to better understand why we need it, along with other forms of alt protein, in the years to come. The hope of many is that cultured meat will eventually reach every grocery store shelf and dining table from Singapore to Dickson, Tennessee. To get there we need restaurants first. 

Craving a Better Ghost Kitchen Experience

Speaking of upscale dining, this week Crave Hospitality Group announced it had raised $7.3 million in seed funding for its Crave Collective facility in Boise, Idaho. 

Funding for ghost kitchens is definitely not exceptional in 2020. But as we learned recently when Crave took us on a virtual tour of its Boise facility, this company approaches the model a little differently. Food coming out of Crave’s kitchens is not your average burger-in-a-to-go-box fare. Rather, the company has teamed up with James Beard Nominees and Food Network Champions alike to bring a more upscale flair to the virtual restaurant/ghost kitchen experience. The idea is not to replace fine-dining restaurants where culinary creativity is valued above speed and efficiency. Rather, it’s to give these chefs and their restaurants a chance to reinvent their menus and in doing so hopefully survive the apocalyptic collapse of the an entire industry. 

Crave’s funding news this week is a good sign for full-service restaurants, which have struggled more than any other restaurant type during the pandemic. If investors are willing to bank on one upscale concept for ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants, chances are, they’ll fund more of them in the coming months and in doing so save some jobs and culinary experiences in the process.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web 

In a first for the restaurant industry, the National Restaurant Association teamed up with third-party delivery services to release its Public Policy Principles for Third Party Delivery. The framework acts as a guide for lawmakers, offering best practices when it comes to third-party delivery services.

Burger King teamed up with Google this week to let customers search out, order, and pay for Burger King fare via Google Search, Maps, and Pay. More than 5,000 BK restaurants in the U.S. will provide this service.

For the first time ever this week, Shake Shack made delivery available directly via its own digital properties. Customers with the iOS app can order delivery meals directly from the brand, rather than going through a third-party platform. That said, Uber Eats is onboard as the exclusive handler of the last mile for this program.

Eat Just Makes the World’s First Sale of Cultured Meat

A couple short weeks after getting regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore, Eat Just announced last night it has made the first commercial sale of its GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken. 1880, a private restaurant/club and social impact organization in Singapore, will debut the product this Saturday, Dec. 19, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

The GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken product will make its debut in three different dishes, each inspired by a different country: Brazil, China, and the United States. The first diners to taste the dishes will be young people, ages 14 to 18, who “have shown, through their consistent actions, a commitment to building a better planet.”  

The sale to 1880 is not only a first for Eat Just, it’s a first for the cell-based meat industry, which has seen plenty of successful lab prototypes but few opportunities for the public to actually taste the products. Up to now, the latter has been in the form of taste-testing events.

Getting regulatory approval to actually sell cultured meat products advances the entire industry. After all, you can have the tastiest, most environmentally friendly cut of slaughter-free meat out there, but without regulatory approval to sell and distribute it, the product won’t make much of an impact on our global food system. We may be years away from finding a cell-based burger or chicken sandwich in the majority of restaurants around the world, but Eat Just’s news is another significant step in that direction. 

Singapore is a logical place to start. The city-state has been at the forefront of much food tech innovation over the last year, with the Singapore government pouring millions of dollars into its 30×30 initiative aimed at increasing local food production. And since the bulk of Singapore’s meat is currently imported, there’s no “Big Meat” producers and lobbyists pushing back on alt protein the way there is in the U.S.

All that said, I also have an eye on Israel as another important location for the advancement of cultured meat. That country is home to a number of cell-based meat companies, with SuperMeat even opening its own test-kitchen-meets-restaurant initiative in Tel Aviv where guests apply to visit the restaurant and taste the food in exchange for detailed feedback. (Dishes on the menu are not yet for sale.) Additionally, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, recently tasted cell-based meat and wants to establish a national policy for alternative protein.

Eat Just has not yet mentioned locations beyond Singapore where the company will sell its GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken. But given the above, Israel would be an obvious next country for the company to expand both the regulatory approval and sale of its cultured meat products. In the meantime, GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken will be available to 1880 customers over the coming weeks and months.  

The Food Tech Show: Cultured Meat’s Big Month

This week the Spoon editorial team got together to talk about the latest food tech news, including whether or not cultured meat would venture into, well, humans.

We all got grossed out (well, most of us) and decided a Mike Burger is a bad idea. But we did agree the food industry will have to address some of the more ethical questions around cultured meat as the ease and cost to replicate cells comes down over time.

Other (not so gross) stories we discuss on the pod also include:

As always, you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) or just click play below.

XPRIZE Launches a Four-Year-Long Competition to Improve Alt-Meat

Non-profit XPRIZE today launched a four-year-long competition to transform the global meat industry. Done in partnership with ASPIRE, the project management pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), the XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion competition will foster technological breakthroughs for a more secure food system as we inch towards 2050 and a larger population. Registration is open now, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The competition was developed in response to XPRIZE’s recently released Future of Food Impact Roadmap, where the organization pinpointed 12 “breakthrough opportunities” that could help build a better food system. Alt-protein is one of those areas. XPRIZE noted today that “the need for alternative proteins at-scale was identified as a critical impact area that requires significant technological advances, decreased price points, and notable shifts in consumers’ preferences – all while maintaining positive health and environmental benefits as compared to animal-based proteins.”

In keeping with that, the Feed the Next Billion Competition will incentivize teams to produce chicken breast and fish fillet alternatives that “replicate or outperform” the real thing in terms of nutrition, environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and taste and texture, according to the competition’s site.

Participants will need to develop multiple consistent cuts of meat alternatives that look, taste, and feel like traditional animal-based meat. All teams will also need to demonstrate the ability to scale production for global distribution. 

The competition comes at a time when the meat and dairy industry account for about 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases and concerns about how to feed a growing world population abound. Alternative proteins, whether plant-based or cultured, have emerged in recent years as a key tool in fighting off the environmental and humanitarian consequences of traditional meat production. There are many routes to alt-protein out there, from Meat-Tech’s 3D-printed cultured beef to the growing list of companies in the $10 million plant-based egg industry. Especially noteworthy recent developments include Eat Just getting the world’s first regulatory approval for cultured meat and Israel’s newly stated goal to develop a national plan for alternative proteins. 

Companies from around the world are invited to register for XPRIZE’s four-year-long competition. Registration will run through April 28, 2021. A total of $15 million will be given to multiple grand prize winners (a specific number of winners was not named) in the first quarter of 2024.

Food Tech News: New Growth Medium for Cultured Meat, Pepsi’s Plastic-Free Promise

As winter quickly approaches, COVID-19 restrictions resurge and stay-at-home orders seem like they’re in the near future. If you’re like me, you might be trying to decide which new kitchen project you want to take on. I perfected my kombucha process in March and even experimented with alcoholic booch (it was terrible). Should I try my hand at vegan donuts or croissants this time around? Sauerkraut or kimchi?

With many of us being stuck indoors once again, it might be a perfect time to catch up on some Food Tech News. This week we have news on the development of a new growth medium for cultured meat cells, sustainable Pepsi bottle packaging, Good Catch’s expansion into Europe, and Subway’s new online catering platform.

Innovate UK funds development of new growth medium for cultured meat

Centre for Process Innovation and 3D Bio-Tissues, a start-up from Newcastle University, have partnered and received grant money from Innovate UK to make cultured meat animal-free while simultaneously reducing the cost of developing it. The project aims to replace the most common growth media used to culture animal cells, called fetal bovine serum (FBS). There is a morality issue with FBS, as it is extracted from slaughtered pregnant cows in the meat and dairy industry. The new serum will likely be developed from agro-industrial byproducts, which would then remove the use of animals and then solve the ethical issue that FBS poses.

Pepsi to go 100 percent plastic-free in several European markets by 2022

PepsiCo announced this week that it will be transitioning to use recycled post-consumer plastics for its Pepsi bottles in several European countries. By 2021, Spain, Greece, Poland, Germany, and Romania will have 100% rPET(recycled polyethylene terephthalate) Pepsi bottles. France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and Great Britain will make the switch by 2022. The company estimates that this change will save around 70,000 tons of single-use plastic a year.

Good Catch expands to Europe

Good Catch, producers of plant-based seafood, expanded its products into the European countries of Spain and the Netherlands this week. The company’s vegan tuna, fish burgers, and crab cakes are now available in 70 different stores throughout the Netherlands and in the specialty chain Sanchez Romero in Madrid. This news follows Good Catch’s recent expansion into Canada in October and the launch of the company’s D2C platform last month.

Subway launches online catering platform

Subway announced the launch of its new online catering platform that is provided by ezCater, an online marketplace for business catering. The new platform aims to offer a convenient way to place large orders for employee lunches and company events. This new feature is now available at every Subway located in the US.

Hong Kong’s Avant Meats Raises $3.1M for Its Cell-Based Seafood

Cell-based protein startup Avant Meats announced this week it had closed a $3.1 million seed round of funding. The round included participation from China Venture Capital, AngelHub, ParticleX, Lever VC, CPT Capital, Loyal VC, Artesian, and 208 Seed Ventures. PTG Food and Regal Springs Chairman Markus Haefeli also participated. 

Avant said in a press release posted to the company’s LinkedIn page that it will use the new funding to “fuel R&D and commercialization of its cultivated fish products.” The Hong Kong-based startup uses fish cells to make cultivated seafood products, including fish maw and sea cucumber. Avant held its first taste test of its fish maw product in November of 2019.

Fish maw and sea cucumber are both considered delicacies in Chinese cuisine, and Avant’s decision to start with those is strategic in terms of attracting its target demographic: consumers in China and Hong Kong. There are environmental reasons, too. Fish maw is in such high demand the species hunted for it are on the brink of extinction.

In addition to the above delicacies, Avant has also debuted a prototype for Asia’s first cultivated fish fillet, which was recently featured in a cooking demonstration from Hong Kong culinary star Chef Eddy.

In this week’s press release, Avant said part of its new funding will go towards lowering production costs of its cell-based seafood products. The company hopes to bring products to market in 2021. 

That date, while right around the corner, actually seems feasible given the recent developments in the cell-based protein space. Most notably, earlier this week Eat Just became the world’s first company to get regulatory approval for selling cultured meat products. The company will start in Singapore.

Eat Just’s regulatory milestone paves the way for other startups, including Avant, to start the journey from successful prototype to mainstream commercialization. That’s not to say Avant will be selling its fish maw on grocery store shelves next year. But we Hong Kong residents and those in other parts of Asia may see it at more testings and demonstrations and on restaurant menus in the months to come.  

cow eating hay beside a farmer

Hybrid Farmers: Could Livestock Producers Expand Cultured Meat?

Cultured meat and alternative protein are out to disrupt the meat industry. But Future Meat‘s Chief Science Officer Yaakov Nahmias says the quickest way to achieve that goal is through the infrastructure that’s already in place, including farmers. Nahmias sees poultry, pork and beef producers as a critical partnership for cultured meat start-ups and the meat industry’s transition.

During an interview two weeks ago, Nahmias said he envisions a role for what he calls hybrid farmers: Traditional livestock producers who invest in a bioreactor, a large steel vat that maintains the environment need for cells to grow and divide, allowing them to culture meat. Farmers could continue to raise livestock and simultaneously take advantage of the efficiency and safety advantages of cultured meat, Nahmias told me in an interview. 

It takes between six weeks and six months for a chicken to reach market weight. Cattle require 14 to 22 months. But if a farmer were to invest in cultured meat, they could also produce a new crop of cultured meat every couple of weeks. Nahmias estimates that a bioreactor the size of a standard refrigerator could generate the mass of 100 chickens every two weeks. And farmers could easily vary the type of meat they’re growing from batch to batch based on demand. “You have the ability to do chicken today, pork for Christmas, and turkey for Thanksgiving and beef for Memorial Day,” he said. 

There will always be a market for traditional agriculture, but this is a way for farmers to diversify, Nahmias told me. On top of faster production and the ability to grow a variety of meats, cultured meat also has a shorter supply chain because there’s no slaughter step. Farmers could sell directly to processors and packers. And maybe most importantly, hybrid farmers would have access to a new customer base–those buyers looking for animal-free protein.

There’s also a safety and efficiency advantage to cultured meat. Viruses can do serious damage to a flock or herd before they’ve even been detected, costing producers months of work and investment. But bioreactors– at least the ones manufactured by Future Meat– will offer real-time detection. A contamination would cost a farmer a couple weeks instead of months or whole animals, Nahmias said. 

Culturing meat does have its limitations, like the fact that it’s not yet possible to produce high value cuts of meat like steaks, chicken breasts and pork chops in a bioreactor.  Future Meat grows muscle and fat cells in separate bioreactors and then combines them using extrusion technology to give the desired texture.  Other start-ups grow the fat and muscle cells concomitantly, but the outcome is the same: a ground product. There are companies developing ways to culture whole muscles, but that technology is a decade away from commercial application. 

Nahmias acknowledges that right now farmers feel threatened by the alternative protein industry and cultured meat. “But they are threatened the same way horse cart drivers were threatened by the car,” he said. The car was a major investment, but in the long term it offered greater financial stability. In other words, the mode of production might be changing, but there’s still room for farmers to be involved. 

Eat Just Gets the World’s First Regulatory Approval to Sell Cultured Meat

In a first for cultured meat, Eat Just has received regulatory approval to sell its cell-based chicken product. The company, best known at this point for its plant-based egg products, announced last night that its cultured chicken product has been approved for sale in Singapore as an ingredient in chicken bites. Other cultured chicken products are planned for the future.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, this approval deems Eat Just’s cell-based chicken as “safe for human consumption.” To achieve this, and to the demonstrate safety and quality of its end product, the company spent months documenting its proprietary process for making cell-based chicken. An analysis included information on the identity and purity of the chicken cells, the full manufacturing process, as well as the nutritional components of the end product. 

Eat Just worked with the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), Singapore’s regulatory authority for food safety. The company said it has also struck deals with “well-established local manufacturers” to finish the product before it goes out to restaurants.

Heading into restaurants first is in keeping with Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick’s timeline for cell-based meat, which he outlined for us at this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit. Cell-based meat companies don’t simply jump from a successful prototype in the lab to mass commercialization. Rather, there are a number of stops along the way, the first of which is to get the prototype out of the lab and into a place like a restaurant. However, the journey for cell-based meats as they evolve from prototype stage will be lengthy: Tetrick put the timeline “somewhere north of 15 years” for when the buying public will find cell-based meats as ubiquitous as, say Coca-Cola products.

Getting regulatory approval is paramount to commercializing cell-based meat, so today’s news marks a significant milestone not only for Eat Just but for the entire cell-based meat sector, which has seen an astounding amount of investment over the last several months. 

Commenting on Eat Just’s milestone, Good Food Institute Executive Director Bruce Friedrich said, “Cultivated meat will mark an enormous advance in our efforts to create a food supply that is safe, secure, and sustainable, and Singapore is leading the way on this transition.”

The regulatory approval will allow Eat Just to launch its forthcoming GOOD Meat brand in Singapore, the details of which are forthcoming at a later date.

Human Steak: the Next Lab-Grown Meat?

The range of alternative meats grown in a lab widens every month, and now we have companies attempting lab-grown beef, chicken, seafood, brisket, and even kangaroo. Could human meat be next?

I doubt it, but a group of designers recently highlighted how possible that concept would be should someone attempt to try it. Andrew Pelling, Orkan Telhan and Grace Knight made a DIY meal kit for lab-grown human meat that was recently nominated for Design of the Year by The Design Museum in London.

Called the Ouroboros Steak (named after the ancient symbol of the snake eating its own tail), the design is for a meal kit that would come with everything a person needs to culture cells from their own body and turn them into mini steaks. The design was commissioned for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Designs for Different Futures exhibition, which ended in March of this year. 

To be clear: no one is growing human meat to sell in the grocery stores. The design is purely conceptual. According to Design Museum, it is “a critical commentary on the lab-grown meat industry and critiques the industry’s claims to sustainability.”

That critique is right on the mark, since lab-grown meat producers generally rely on the controversial Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS) to produce their alt-meat wares. FBS is a byproduct that comes from the blood of cow fetuses. As this article from Slate from a few years back highlights, it’s a gruesome practice that involves killing a pregnant cow, removing the live fetus, then draining the latter of blood that eventually gets refined and turned into FBS. 

The website for the Ouroboros Steak concept doesn’t specifically mention FBS, but notes, almost wryly, that, “Growing yourself ensures that you and your loved ones always know the origin of your food, how it has been raised and that its cells were acquired ethically and consensually.”

To be fair, a number of lab-grown meat companies acknowledge the ethics around FBS, and some are taking steps to find a different media for their products. When I spoke with BioBQ last month, CEO Katie Kam emphasized that her company does not use FBS and is instead looking for an alternative media for its lab-grown brisket. In Canada, a company called Future Fields is in the midst of developing what it calls “animal-free media,” which is just as it sounds.

Still, the FBS is the go-to media when it comes to cell-based meat, and calling out the ethics of it was a major goal of the Ouroboros Steak design: “As the lab-grown meat industry is developing rapidly, it is important to develop designs that expose some of its underlying constraints in order to see beyond the hype,” Pelling told Dezeen magazine.

He added that, “We are not promoting ‘eating ourselves’ as a realistic solution that will fix humans’ protein needs. We rather ask a question: what would be the sacrifices we need to make to be able to keep consuming meat at the pace that we are?”

Lab-grown meat is in the midst of an investment frenzy, not to mention the subject of much hype and news coverage. But it won’t be landing on grocery store shelves any time soon, in part because, in addition to being controversial, FBS is extremely expensive. A number of regulatory issues and questions around scalability also need to be resolved before we’re eating a cell-based Big Mac or nabbing a couple fillets for the backyard BBQ. Opinions differ around lab-grown meat’s timeline to the mainstream, with some claiming it will take just a couple years and others putting that mark “somewhere north of 15.” Some say it will never happen.

Wherever the reality falls, lab-grown meat producers will have to address the controversies surrounding their process process. That could mean explaining to consumers the gory details of FBS or, better yet, finding an alternative. Human meat won’t ever be that alternative, but the Ouroboros Steak project rightly reminds us we need to think twice about the ethics of innovation before barelling headlong into the hype.

Shiok Meats Unveils Prototype for Cell-Based Lobster

At a recent exclusive tasting event, Singapore-based Shiok Meats unveiled a prototype for cell-based lobster, according to FoodNavigator-Asia, who attended the event. The prototype was unveiled at the event as part of two dishes, a lobster gazpacho and lobster terrine.

Shiok said the lobster is cultivated with the same technology the company uses it make its cell-based shrimp. Shiok takes a sample of lobster cells, which are then grown in a bioreactor and harvested several weeks later. Right now, it takes between four and six weeks for Shiok to produce its cell-based shrimp; the company says the lobster takes a couple weeks longer than that. It is also more expensive to produce, though the company is looking to bring the cost down to $50/kg at some point in the future.

Neither the shrimp nor the lobster are available for sale to consumers right now. The company plans to have its Shiok Shrimp product commercially available by 2022. A manufacturing plant in Singapore is slated to be operational at that time, too. Shiok raised a $12.6 million Series A round in September of this year, part of which will go towards building out the production facility. FoodNavigator reported that once that plant is up and running, Shiok will be able to get regulatory approval to sell its products, which it will initially do in restaurants and other B2B settings.

No cell-based meat or seafood is currently available for commercial sale, though plenty of companies are moving towards that future. The list includes BlueNalu, a company that also makes cell-based seafoods and is currently expanding its production facility, which the company plans to open in the next five years. And plenty of investment is currently happening in the cell-based meat sector, with Mosa Meat, Integriculture, Meat-Tech 3D, and others all raising funding in the last six months.

However, being able to sell these products to mainstream consumers and at scale will be a much longer process, one that could take up to 15 years, by some accounts. Costs must first come down, and companies must get regulatory approval before they can even sell their products to restaurants.

For its part, Shiok will keep innovating on various cell-based seafoods in the meantime. In addition to shrimp and lobster, the company plans to introduce a cell-based carp prototype in a few months.