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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cultured Meat

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Granted Regulatory Approval to Sell New Cultivated Chicken Products in Singapore

Today Eat Just announced its GOOD Meat division has received the regulatory go-ahead to sell new types of cultivated chicken products in Singapore. The company will debut one of the new formats, a chicken breast, at the JW Marriott Singapore South Beach next week.

The green light comes just over a year after the company received the world’s first approval to sell cultivated meat from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), Singapore’s regulatory authority for food safety. Soon after, GOOD Meat set a milestone by making the first commercial sale of cultivated chicken at 1880, a private restaurant/club and social impact organization in Singapore.

As part of the announcement, GOOD Meat also committed to increased investment in its cultivated meat production capacity in Singapore over the next two years. The company said the design and manufacturing of vessels and systems that will increase its cultivated meat production capacity are already underway, and they hope to have the new infrastructure operational within the next two years. Eat Just’s cultivated meat division also committed to growing its team in Singapore across manufacturing, science, and engineering as the company moves towards scaling up its production.

The latest regulatory approval is another example of Singapore’s aggressive push into alternative proteins and cultivated meat. The effort is part of the island nation’s “30 By 30” food sovereignty initiative to scale up its capability and capacity to produce 30 percent of its food supply by 2030. And it’s not just Eat Just; other future food companies such as Perfect Day and Avant Meats are investing in building out innovation centers in the country.

Compared to Singapore, the US government has been comparatively slow to foster the next generation of alternative proteins, but that looks to be changing. In October, the USDA announced a $10 million grant award to Tufts to create an Institute for Cellular Agriculture, a flagship American cultivated protein research center of excellence, which followed a $3.5 million grant to UC Davis to establish a training and research program by the National Science Foundation. At the same time, in September, the USDA began to solicit input about what it should call cultivated meat products, a signal that it is progressing towards regulatory approval of the products.

UPSIDE Foods Develops Animal-Free Cell Growth Medium

If you want to grow a cell-based steak, you’ll need a good growth medium — a nutrient-rich soup that feeds the cells as they proliferate. We’ve written previously about the cell-based meat industry’s push to ditch fetal bovine serum, a growth medium extracted from cow fetuses, and develop animal-free alternatives. By cutting animal inputs, companies can cut the costs of cell-cultivated meats, as well as the products’ environmental footprints.

Californian cell-based startup UPSIDE Foods switched away from fetal bovine serum years ago, and set a research and development team to the task of developing an alternative medium with zero animal inputs. Last week, the company announced that it has achieved that milestone, converting to an animal-free medium.

“Since day one, we knew that developing animal component-free cell feed would be crucial to fully realizing our vision of meat that’s better for the planet and its inhabitants,” company founder and CEO Dr. Uma Valeti said in a press release. “Cell feed is among the biggest drivers of cost and environmental footprint for the cultivated meat industry, and optimizing it is key to maximizing our positive impact. Our ultimate goal is to remove animals from our meat production process entirely.”

UPSIDE has used its animal-free medium to grow cell-cultivated chicken nuggets and hot dogs, demonstrating the versatility of the substrate. The company plans to grow all of its products with the new medium in future.

The achievement will help UPSIDE to scale as the company moves toward commercialization. Last month, the company unveiled its new production and development facility in Emeryville, Calif. The facility can produce 50,000 pounds of meat per year, and the company plans to boost that capacity to 400,000 pounds over time. Commercialization is still on hold as the industry waits for the USDA and FDA to create a regulatory framework — but with lower costs and increased capacity, UPSIDE is poised to take its products to the public.

What Does a Cultivated Meat Plant Look Like? Take a Video Tour of UPSIDE Foods’ New Production Facility to Find Out

According to the Good Food Institute, there are approximately 70+ companies working on cultivated meat services, inputs, and end products. At this time, Singapore has been the only country to offer regulatory approval for the commercial sale of cultivated meat, and Qatar is expected to be next to do so. Despite this, several companies in the cultured meat space have opened up state-of-the-art facilities to develop their alternative meat products in anticipation of receiving regulatory approval sooner than later.

One of these companies is UPSIDE Foods (formerly Memphis Meats). Last week, UPSIDE Foods hosted a ceremony to celebrate the unveiling of its 53,000 square foot Engineering, Production, and Innovation Center (EPIC for short). The center will be used for the production of cultivated meat and the development of new types of meat and product formats.

It’s easy enough to find Youtube videos about how plant-based meat or real hamburger is made, but because the cultivated meat industry is so nascent, behind-the-scenes looks at this industry have been harder to come by. Until now. UPSIDE Foods shared a video tour of the inside of its EPIC facility. Take a look:

UPSIDE Foods Grand Opening

The front of the facility hosts a kitchen for hosting tastings of cultivated meat. There are areas dedicated to the milling and mixing of cell feed, as well as areas for packaging and testing products. Products will be tested for safety and quality in EPIC’s quality assurance facilities. UPSIDE has also provided an office for federal inspectors to oversee every process, which is required in all meat and poultry processing facilities in the U.S

UPSIDE’s innovation center will employ about 50 people throughout different departments, including maintenance, production, quality & food safety, engineering, and plant management.

Less than half, or only about 40 percent, of Americans are willing to try cultivated meat. Hopefully, allowing consumers to get a glance into cultivated meat facilities might help them warm up to the idea of this alternative protein.

Want to see a cultivated meat facility in action for yourself? UPSIDE will begin offering in-person tours at its Emeryville, California facilities in January 2022.

Alt. Protein Round-up: Upside’s New Cultivated Meat Plant, Plant-Based Hard-boiled Egg

It was another action-packed week in alt-protein, including the launch of one of the industry’s largest production facilities to date for cultivated meat and the unveiling of a new plant-based hard-boiled egg.

If you missed them earlier, don’t worry – we’ve got you covered. Here are some of the week’s biggest stories from the world of alternative protein:

Upside Foods unveils cultured meat innovation center

Cultivated meat company Upside Foods (previously Memphis Meats) announced this week that it had completed its Engineering, Production, and Innovation Center. Located in Emeryville, California, the 53,000 square foot facility can produce up to 50,000 lbs of cultivated meat product per year. The facility is also flexible: Any species of meat or seafood in both whole-cut and ground form can be produced. Upside expects the facility to be fully operational by the end of the year.

Future Farm raises $58 million

Brazilian-based Future Farm (also called Fazenda Futuro), an alternative meat startup, closed a $58 million Series C round this week. The round was led by BTG and Rage Capital, with participation from XP Inc., Monashees, Go4It Capital, Turim MFO, and Enfini Ventures. The company will use the funding to expand its product availability to retailers throughout the U.S. and Europe. Additionally, Future Farm will begin developing dairy alternatives like milk and butter.

Yali Bio comes out of stealth mode to discuss future synthetic fat products

San Francisco-based startup Yali Bio aims to address the environmental concerns of both animal products and tropical oils by producing a synthetic, plant-based fat product. Apart of the Illumina Accelerator program (which runs from September 2021-March 2022), Yali Bio combines synthetic biology and genomics to develop its products. Read the full article here.

Migros launches plant-based hard-boiled egg. Watch this video to see how it’s made

The new egg, called The Boiled, is the latest from the company’s plant-based product line, V-Love. According to the announcement, The Boiled is made with fourteen different ingredients but gets its protein punch from soy. The alt-egg will be on sale this month in stores across Switzerland in four-packs and will retail for 4.40 Swiss Francs (~$4.84). Read the full article and watch the video here.

Ingredient optimized raises Series A funding to expand protein enhancement tech

Ingredient Optimized is a different kind of protein startup. While others in the space are focused on perfecting plant-based burgers and growing more protein-rich peas, the biotech company uses a novel process to alter the physical structures of proteins, making them easier for the body to absorb. Read the full article here.

Alt. Protein Round-Up: Hybrid Chorizo Sausages and Impossible’s Burger Stand

Government programs around the globe are increasingly getting more involved in the alternative protein space. This month, the Danish government allocated 1.25 billion kroner (~$194 million USD) for research into plant-based proteins. A few weeks ago, the USDA awarded Tufts University $10 million to establish “a cultivated protein center of excellence”. Most recently, a European agency called REACT-EU set aside $2 million in funding to help decrease the costs of producing cultivated meat (see below).

In this Alt. Protein Round-up, we also have news pieces on Mission Barns’ product unveil, Black Sheep Foods plant-based lamb, Impossible Meat’s burger stand, and ADM’s investment into precision fermentation.

Mission Barns and Silva Sausages unveil first product

Cultivated fat producer Mission Barns and sausage manufacturer Silva Sausages unveiled their first product produced in partnership: chorizo sausages. The sausages are a hybrid product, made with undisclosed plant proteins and Mission Barn’s proprietary cultivated fat. This is the first production run of the product, and this trial exemplified that the companies have the capabilities to produce the sausages on a large scale. In the multi-year partnership, Mission Barns will use Silva’s facilities (which can produce up to 50,000 lbs of sausage per day) and distribution network. There is no date set for an official launch of the hybrid chorizo sausages

European REACT-EU grants $2 million for “Feed for Meat” project

The “Feed for Meat” project was started by Nutreco and Mosa Meat, and it aims to lower the cost of producing cultivated meat. The European REACT-EU recovery assistance program just awarded the project $2 million to support efforts in commercializing cultivated eat throughout Europe. This funding will specifically be used for R&D efforts for reducing the costs of cultured cell media. This component is typically the most expensive part of cultured meat; however, Mosa Meat has shared that it has successfully reduced the cost of one of the growth nutrients by 98 percent.

Black Sheep Foods Launches Plant-Based Lamb in San Francisco Restaurants

This week, alternative protein startup Black Sheep Foods’ plant-based lamb made its debut in San Francisco restaurants. The launch is a big step for the Black Sheep team, which wants to offer more variety to plant-based meat eaters. “Our first product is lamb because it’s both alien and familiar in America,” company co-founder Sunny Kumar told The Spoon this week over Zoom. “Everyone knows about lamb, but no one really eats it at a high cadence.” Read the full article here.

ADM Invests in Acies Bio to expand precision fermentation capabilities

Global nutrition and agriculture company, ADM, invested in the Slovenian biotechnology company, Acies Bio through its venture capital arm ADM Ventures. One of Acies Bio’s specialties is precision fermentation technology for food and agricultural applications, and this technology will be used to assist ADM accelerate its own precision fermentation projects. Making use of Acies Bio’s microbial capabilities and contract manufacturing services, ADM aims to meet the growing demand for products developed through microbial fermentation.

Impossible Foods Opens a Burger Stand in Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena

This week Impossible and Climate Pledge Arena, the world’s first net zero-carbon sports arena, announced that the Impossible patty had been named the venue’s official burger. They also announced Impossible is opening two branded food stands in the home of the NHL’s newest franchise, the Seattle Kraken. Read the full article here.

The Week in Food Tech Funding: Culture Biosciences & Tufts Nab Funding as Interest in Scaling Cell Ag Grows

Over the past 12 months, money has poured into cultivated meat startups as venture investors, celebrities, and governments look to get in on what many believe is the next big thing in alternative protein.

However, as the excitement grows, some are taking a harder look at how to scale the production of lab-grown meat to make a dent in the larger animal-based meat market. According to one estimate, the industry will need up to $30 billion invested in cell-based/fermentation production capacity if the alternative protein market hits just 11% of total meat consumption by 2035 and significantly more if consumer adoption exceeds expectations.

Much of that $30 billion will be directed to capital investment in building out long-term production capacity. However, before we get there, the industry first needs to invest in organizations building the necessary technology and production platforms to enable scale-up. This week saw two significant investments intended for just that: Culture Biosciences ($80 million) and Tufts University & partners ($10 million).

Culture Biosciences helps companies developing future food products with its bioreactor-as-a-service platform. The company introduced its first product a couple of years ago, a cloud-connected benchtop bioreactor service for cell-culture and bioprocess development. With their new round of funding, Culture looks to move beyond the bench with cloud-connected 5L and 250L bioreactors-as-a-service that will help firms optimize for pilot scale bio-manufacturing.

The second investment isn’t a traditional venture investment, but the $10 million USDA funding award to Tufts University for a cultured protein center of excellence is a vital investment nonetheless. In partnership with others, Tufts will lead an Institute for Cellular Agriculture to develop foundational technologies and processes to enable the cultivated meat industry to progress towards scaled production. The foundational work done by this organization will include everything from research on next-generation cell-culture medium to the development of education and leadership programs for the cultivated meat industry.

As companies try to take cultivated meat from the lab to the manufacturing plant, some question if cellular agriculture will ever be able to scale upwards cost-effectively and safely enough to justify all the investment. While we won’t know the answer to this question for a few years, it’s an encouraging sign that investments are being made to address the next big challenge in cellular agriculture.

And now, the rest of this week’s funding news:

Food Supply Chain

TrusTrace – $6 Million: TrusTrace, a Sweden-based startup building food supply chain traceability software solutions, has raised a $6 million Series A funding round. TrusTrace uses blockchain, AI, and bots to track products as they navigate their way through the supply chain. The company claims to have 8 thousand suppliers and 250 thousand products on the platform. My guess is TrusTrace and other traceability platform players are getting lots of inbound inquiries as everyone from ingredient and component suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers are trying to figure out how to work through the great 2021 supply chain disequilibrium.

Plant-Based Food

Grounded Foods – $2.5 Million: Plant-based cheese maker Grounded Foods has announced a $2.5 million raise. The company, founded by the husband and wife team of Shaun Quade and Veronica Fil, makes cheese products with hemp seeds and cauliflower. Grounded is already in 160 different retail locations today and plans to use the funds to expand further in the US and to set up for expansion into Europe.

Ag Tech

Kuva Space – €4.2M ($4.9M): Kuva Space, a provider of realtime agricultural data using space-borne hyperspectral camera technology, has raised $4.9 million. The company plans on using the funding to launch a constellation of six-unit nano-satellites to gather imagery in the 400 to 1,100 nanometer band. The company provides data that helps farmers optimize fertilizer and irrigation needs, optimal harvesting times, and early-stage pest or plant disease detection. With its second generation satellites, the company plans to expand its carbon monitoring capabilities.

Food Waste

Orbisk – €2.4M: Orbisk, which provides professional kitchens with automated analysis of food usage and associated waste flow using machine vision and AI, has received a €2.4 million grant from the European Commission’s European Innovation Council (EIC). The data from Orbisk’s analysis allows customers to adapt processes and purchasing to better manage and reduce food waste. Orbisk won the EIC funding with a pitch for its ‘Binspector’ project, under which the company will invest in dynamic AI models to increase accuracy and rapid adaptation in international menus, as well as further development of its food management algorithms.

Fish Tech

OptoScale – $4.1m (£3m): Optoscale, which makes machine vision and sensor technologies real-time monitoring of fish farm stock, has raised £3 million led by SWEN Capital Partners. The Norway-based company says it can analyze up to 200,000 fish per day using its technology, which compares with 50 to 100 fish using traditional analysis methods. Optoscale, which currently operates in Norway, Canada, and Scotland, plans to use the money to expand operations to Australia, Chile, and Iceland.

Restaurant Tech

ResQ – $39 Million: Well that was fast. After raising $7.5 million in a June seed funding round, ResQ, which provides a software platform for managing restaurant repair and maintenance tasks, has raised a $39 million Series A. Through their platform, restaurants can request, manage, and pay for a service, as well as manage the documents for these things. ResQ also connects restaurants with a network of contractors able to perform those services. The company’s list of available services includes HVAC, refrigeration, electrical, janitorial, plumbing, pest control, grease trap cleaning, preventative maintenance, and most anything else needed to keep a restaurant kitchen up and running. Since its seed round, the company has said its customer base has grown from seven states to 36 in the US. They plan to use the funding to grow their team by 400%.

C3 – $10 Million: Virtual restaurant/host kitchen platform company C3 has raised another $10 million in strategic funding from Swiss private capital firm, Lurra Capital, just a few months after it had raised a $80 million Series B. C3 (short for Creating Culinary Communities), works with kitchen operators (host kitchens) to fulfill orders for virtual restaurant brands. As of mid-year, the company operated about 40 virtual restaurant brands. The company plans to open 1,000 virtual brand locations by year’s end and has plans to open 12,000 globally by 2023.

Food Robots

Future Acres – $1.7 Million: Farm robotics startup Future Acres has raised $1.7 million via equity crowdfunding on Seedinvest. The company makes a self-driving robot called Carry that utilizes GPS and computer vision to navigate around the field and haul up to 500 pounds of produce. The company, which has raised a little over $400 thousand in pre-seed funding, plans to use the funds for product development, payroll, marketing and operations.

The Counter Asks If Cultivated Meat is a Billion Dollar Boondoggle. It’s a Question Worth Asking.

Last week, The Counter’s Deputy Editor Joe Fassler wrote an article asking whether cultivated meat is the future of meat or just a billion-dollar boondoggle?

It’s a question worth asking. While many believe this new way of producing meat will radically change the food industry over the next decade, the reality is the technology required for scaling cultivated meat production to where it creates enough food to make a dent in the conventional meat market has yet to be invented.

Fassler starts his story with Paul Wood, who doubts the viability of cultivated meat as a traditional meat replacement. According to Fassler, Wood, the one time the executive director of global discovery for Pfizer Animal Health, couldn’t understand “how costly biomanufacturing techniques could ever be used to produce cheap, abundant human food.”

After years of wondering, Wood thought he’d get his answer early this year when the Good Food Institute (GFI) released a techno-economic analysis (TEA) about cultivated meat. The TEA from GFI broke down how the cultivated meat industry would tackle a series of technical challenges that they believed would eventually transform this early-stage technology into a volume producer of high-protein calories for the masses. The report, Fassler writes, “showed how addressing a series of technical and economic barriers could lower the production price from over $10,000 per pound today to about $2.50 per pound over the next nine years—an astonishing 4,000-fold reduction.”

Wood didn’t buy it. He thought GFI’s report trafficked in wishful thinking when it came to how the industry would address the hard technical challenges that needed to be overcome.

There’s some back and forth about the economics of cultivated meat production as Fassler wonders whether investors understand what advancements are needed for them to make their money back eventually, but perhaps the most interesting part of the story is when he looks at whether the science of cellular agriculture will support cell reproduction at the scale needed to make cultivated meat viable. New facilities are needed, and those facilities – called bioreactors – will need to be optimized to the point where contamination and bacteria growth do not ruin whole production runs and make cell-cultured meat production way too costly in the process. It hasn’t been done yet, and yet the entire industry is betting it can be.

I won’t recite the entire Counter article; you should read it yourself, since, after all, it’s an important and well-written piece of in-depth journalism. Instead, I’ll just say it makes a convincing case that viability of scaling cultivated meat production is the central existential question facing this industry, and it’s really THE only question that should be keeping investors in this space up at night.

In some ways, it reminds me of the decades-long debate about the feasibility of using nuclear fusion as a way to produce cheap, environmentally friendly energy for the masses. However, unlike nuclear fusion, investors are acting as if the science for cultivated meat is largely a solved problem. Because of this, money is pouring in, and aggressive timelines are being set.

Eventually, these same investors will insist they make a return on their investments, which means, more than likely, we won’t have to wait decades to find out if they are making a wise -or foolish – bet.

We Talked to BlueNalu About Creating Fish Cell Lines From Scratch

Cellular aquaculture pioneer BlueNalu was born out of a contradiction. The company’s founders noted that while technological development around mammal cell products was booming, there was a relative dearth of knowledge about fish cell development. Yet the market opportunity for cell-cultured fish—with global demand for seafood on the rise and wild stocks increasingly vulnerable—looked big.

In attempting to do for fish cells what its peers were doing for cow cells, BlueNalu and other cell-cultured seafood companies faced a steep learning curve. Mammal-cell companies could take advantage of existing cell lines and a wealth of research from the pharmaceutical industry, but fish-cell companies would have to start almost from scratch, unlocking the unique conditions required to propagate and stabilize fish cells.

For BlueNalu, the mission was not only to develop a stable cell line for a single species of fish. “It was about having the correct methods to be able to reproducibly extract stem cells from a wide range of species,” Lauran Madden, the company’s Vice President of Research and Product Development, told The Spoon this week over Zoom.

So the company developed a proprietary technology platform that would allow it to create stable cell lines, with the flexibility to switch from one species to another. Madden says that achieving that reproducibility was a special challenge because cell growth conditions vary between species. “For example, mahi and tuna are not exactly the same, but they’re more similar to each other than they are to a cow,” she says.

To identify a group of focus species, BlueNalu used a decision matrix that factored in a variety of species attributes. The team looked at how scarce or vulnerable a species was, and how heavily it was imported. They also considered species that pose health concerns—like tuna, which contains mercury. And they looked for species that couldn’t be raised using conventional aquaculture.

The search for suitable donor fish also had to be carried out carefully. “We try to find trustworthy sources for species, where they’re legally bred or caught,” says Madden. “And we do extensive testing on the sample tissue to make sure that it’s free of contaminants.”

The team ultimately succeeded in creating cell lines for eight different species of fish, including bluefin tuna, mahi mahi, yellowtail, and snapper.

With its proprietary tech platform and species flexibility, BlueNalu aspires to become more than a manufacturer of a fixed line of cell-cultured seafood products. “Our approach is to become a global brand, a supply chain of seafood products,” company President and CEO Lou Cooperhouse told The Spoon this week in a Zoom interview. In theory, the company could use its platform to respond to a decline of a given fish species.

Having invested extensively in building new technology, the company is eyeing a range of intellectual property opportunities. But Cooperhouse doesn’t expect to see the cell-cultured seafood space become as competitive as the plant-based meats arena in the near future. The technological barrier that still exists for budding cell-cultured seafood companies means that there’s still strong competitive insulation in this industry niche.

“This is a challenging category that requires quite a bit of capital,” he says. “In making cell-cultured fish fillets, there’s really, in my opinion, no other way to do this but through our technology.”

BlueNalu’s investments in research and development may eventually find applications outside of the alternative protein industry: The team believes that some of its discoveries could help to power scientific research and support conservation efforts. For instance, the company’s technology could help researchers to understand fish species’ responses to environmental contaminants at the cellular level.

“There’s so much that is unknown about fish species and the ocean in general,” says Cooperhouse. “We’re all about preserving biodiversity and ecosystem erosion. So yes, there could be some licensing opportunities and other opportunities for our technology to have some real value outside of BlueNalu.”

With its species cell lines ready to grow, BlueNalu is preparing to launch its products in the U.S. and abroad. The company recently announced a new partnership with European frozen food company Nomad Foods, the latest in a series of international partnerships. Cooperhouse believes the company’s tech platform will support its mission of supplying scarce fish species worldwide without competing with local, conventional aquaculture businesses.

“We’re not just making healthier products that are sustainable,” he says. “Our products also support food security, they create jobs, they build factories. It really is a bit of a holy grail opportunity for us.”

With Series of Partnerships, Givaudan Positions Itself for an Alt Protein Future

Swiss flavor manufacturer Givaudan recently announced plans to open a new Cultured Food Innovation Hub by 2022. This is the latest in a flurry of new initiatives that suggest the company is positioning itself as a major player in the alternative protein industry.

Givaudan and its partners hope to support cell-cultured protein startups as they perform research and development and bring new products to market. At the Innovation Hub, startups will have access to cell-culture and bio-fermentation equipment, as well as a product development laboratory.

With many countries awaiting regulatory decisions for cell-cultured products, Givaudan appears to be anticipating a growing demand for business-to-business services in the industry. The company already partners with plant-based meat and dairy startups to develop, prototype, and test products. This foray into cultivated protein territory means they’ll stay on the cutting edge as cell-culture products make their debuts.

The facility will be built outside of Zurich, and will be owned in partnership with plant equipment manufacturer Bühler and retail food giant Migros—a partnership that’s interesting in its own right. Pooling their ranges of expertise, the companies should be able to offer comprehensive, turnkey services to would-be cell-cultured meat manufacturers. Fabio Campanile, Givaudan’s Global Head of Science and Technology, Taste & Wellbeing, commented on the partnership in a recent press release:

“Bühler contributes with industry-leading solutions that are used in the scale-up and production of thousands of food products around the world; Givaudan brings in centuries of experience and knowledge in every aspect of taste, including all kinds of meat alternatives, and deep expertise in biotechnology, to product development; Migros is known for its competence in customer interaction and market cultivation.”

Givaudan has also been keeping busy with its own research and development efforts, working on producing sustainable flavor ingredients for alternative meats and other products. Last month, The Spoon reported on Givaudan and Ginkgo Bioworks’ joint effort to develop new flavor and fragrance ingredients through bio-fermentation. More recently, the company announced another partnership with Danish biotech company Biosyntia—this one focused on transforming natural sugars into flavoring agents.

We may see more companies from outside of the alternative protein industry take an interest in cell-cultured meat. German life sciences and electronics manufacturer Merck KGaA is now offering technology solutions (from process design to growth medium formulation) for cell-cultured manufacturers. These big-name partners should help smaller startups to bring their products to market more quickly.

Unicorn Biotechnologies Is Making Purpose-Built Bioreactors for Cell-Based Meat Production

Jack Reid believes that the cell-based meat industry could move a lot faster if it just used manufacturing equipment made for the job.

According to the CEO of a new Cambridge-based startup called Unicorn Biotechnologies, companies trying to make meat without the animal today are mostly using large metal vats built for making something other than meat.

“Existing bioreactor systems haven’t been and weren’t developed specifically for the cell ag industry,” said Reid.

That’s right. In an industry where hundreds of millions of dollars in venture funding has flowed into companies that are predicted to be someday worth billions of dollars, startups are using equipment ill-suited for the task at hand. Instead of using machines made to replicate animal cells at scale, these companies are using bioreactors optimized to create products already produced in large volumes and have established markets.

“We’re talking about large fermenting systems that are for brewing beer,” said Reid. “Or even pharmaceutical grade bioreactors that are designed for vaccine manufacturing and recombinant protein production.”

By using equipment that is not purpose-fit for replicating animal cells for cultured meat products, Reid thinks a massive amount of inefficiency and cost is added to the process. Pharma bioreactors don’t have the right sensors and are built to make a smaller amount of product at a much higher cost. Beer fermenters are built, well, to make beer. But the biggest problem in Reid’s mind is using systems that aren’t built for cell-based meat means you ultimately have unhappy cells.

“Most bioreactors have a long period optimization period where you have to figure out how to make the conditions just right to make the cells happy and to allow them to proliferate, differentiate and turn into the fat, muscle,” said Reid.

And making the cells happy is a challenge cell-based meat makers need to address at each phase of the process. This can mean optimizing the process on the research bench, during pilot production, and ultimately for fully scaled manufacturing.

If this sounds like a problem for an industry hoping to make enough product to account for a significant percentage of the overall meat market by the end of the decade, it is. But Reid and his co-founder Dr. Adam Glen think they have a solution: a modular manufacturing system built for cell-based meat production.

Why modular? Because as Reid describes it, with a modular bioreactor system, the transfer of the highly technical process for making a cell-based meat product would only need to happen once, from the lab bench to their bioreactor. After that, a company could scale up production by simply adding more modules.

“The path to scaling up your production capacity is going from one module to two, ten, one hundred, and so on until you reach your desired output.”

How would it all work? According to Reid, like a bunch of robots working together.

“A good parallel might be swarm robotics,” said Reid, who pointed to the example of robotic systems used in large grocery warehouses. “In those, we’re not looking at 100 different robots acting together. We’re looking at one system with 100 different ways to interact with the warehouse. That is the principle that underpins our technology and our modular system.”

By having a highly flexible system that can fit various sizes of producers, Reid thinks his systems could bring cell-based meat-making to a more widely distributed group of future meat manufacturers.

“We’d like it to be a reality where smaller manufacturing systems are a realistic possibility,” said Reid. “To bring to individual farms, to bring to communities, and really to spread the manufacturing of these products away from the highly centralized production model that has dominated protein manufacturing for the last few decades.”

But before all this happens, Reid and his team need to build the product and get it ready for manufacturing. The company, which took on a pre-seed funding round from SOSV/HAX and Entrepreneur First, is currently building its product prototype in the labs.

“Once we’ve hit a few more of our milestones, we’re looking to go out and do our next round of fundraising, scale up the team, and transform our prototype it into the first generation of our product.”

David Welch on GMO Controversy and Its Lessons for the Cell-Cultured Meat Industry

The introduction of GMO crops in the 1990s was a moment of opportunity for international agriculture—yet communications with consumers went wrong.

GMO crops have been called frankenfoods, mutants, and carcinogens. According to the Pew Research Center, roughly half of U.S. adults believe that GMO foods are less healthy than GMO-free foods. The Non-GMO Project reports that its butterfly graphic is “the fastest-growing label in the natural products industry.”

Now Chief Scientific Officer and Co-Founder at Synthesis Capital, an investment management firm focused on food system transformation, David Welch has a researcher’s outlook on the rollout of GMO crops. He spent his undergraduate years studying plant biology at UC Berkeley. In his later experience as a research assistant, some of his work focused on genetically modified crops like barley and maize.

Last week, I got on Zoom with Welch to unpack the parallels between the launch of GMO crops and the advent of cell-cultured meats today.

Avoiding a communication breakdown

Around the time when GM crops were first introduced to the public, the scientific community was still debating the safety implications of modified foods. Welch believes that some of that early discourse sowed the seeds of public uncertainty about the safety of GMO foods. Even once the scientific community had reached a consensus, it was difficult to clear up the confusion that had already been created.

“I’m not suggesting that you should stop negative discussions from taking place, and I think it’s fine to have some dissenting views,” says Welch. Yet the lack of clear communication regarding the underlying science of GMOs likely had an impact on public acceptance, an important lesson for the cell-cultured meat industry: “There’s an opportunity for the industry to work closely together to make sure that the science is communicated in a non-confusing way.”

Welch hopes to see companies, governments, and academics work together to develop a common language for describing cell cultivation concepts. That language could help to smooth out issues in the regulation and labeling arena, which has already proven to be a contentious zone for plant-based products.

Importantly, that common language would also help to standardize communications with the public—“so that you don’t have 20 companies talking about the science in 20 different ways, which then creates confusion,” says Welch.

Regulation and mistrust

Even in the U.S., where some GM ingredients have been widely adopted, the regulation of modified crops is notoriously arduous.

“It’s a very expensive and multi-year process to get a GMO crop approved in basically any country,” says Welch. “And I think there’s some evidence through consumer research that that leads to distrust in the technology. People think, if they have to regulate this so stringently, then it must be dangerous.”

Here, he says, lies a potential parallel between GM and cell-cultured meat technologies. In the U.S. and most other countries, the alternative meat industry is still awaiting a regulatory framework. That framework could ultimately affect consumers’ views of cell-cultured meats.

“I’m not suggesting that we should have no regulation,” says Welch. “I think that the regulatory authorities and the companies need to work together to create a regulatory pathway that is safe, but not so onerous that the public perceives the technology as very risky because there’s so much regulation attached to it.”

The future of food work

“One of the other tensions that existed with GM crops was how they were rolled out into the market and the impact that had on some farming communities,” says Welch. From the beginning, seeds for GMO commodity crops were controlled by a few large companies, a trend that has only intensified since the technology was first introduced. “Those companies ended up with a lot of control over the farmers, and I think that’s had negative effects on some farmers.”

There’s another lesson there for cell-cultured meat companies: Many consumers’ perceptions of alternative meat products could well be affected by the industry’s impact on their own communities.

“I think it’s important for the entire food industry to start talking about this,” says Welch. “I believe there’s going to be a future where there are far more alternative meats than conventional meats on the market. And we need to think about what that means for all of the people who are employed through the conventional meat and seafood industries, and what the future looks like for them in terms of new jobs.”

As cell-cultured meat makes its first forays into the U.S. market, producers are sure to face communications challenges. However, Welch notes that there are also opportunities to build trust with consumers by being transparent about the cell cultivation process.

“The way we currently produce meat and seafood, there’s that hidden step between the field—if the animal ever lived on a field—and the point where it gets to your plate,” he says. “I think it’s really exciting that consumers will be able to see how their meat is being made much more openly in the future.”

Alt Protein Round-Up: Cultured Seafood in Europe, Precision Fermentation in Silicon Valley

The Good Food Institute released a new report that shared in the first half of 2021, alternative seafood companies raised a total of $116 million in funding, compared to $26 million in all of 2020. In contrast, last year saw a 23 percent increase in U.S.-based alternative seafood sales.

In addition to this report on alternative seafood, we’ve got news on BlueNalu, Meatable, Change Foods, Enough, and a new cultured food hub in Switzerland.

BlueNalu to bring cultured seafood to Europe

BlueNalu announced this week that it would explore the distribution of its cell-based seafood throughout Europe in partnership with frozen food company Nomad Foods. According to the two companies, this is the first agreement between a cultured protein company and a consumer packaged goods company in Europe. BlueNalu did not disclose what seafood analogs it would supply or when distribution throughout Europe would occur.

Givaudan, Bühler, and Migros form the Cultured Food Innovation Hub

Givaudan, Bühler, and Migros, three Swedish corporations, have partnered to open the Cultured Food Innovation Hub outside of Zürich, Switzerland. The hub, which is set to open in 2022, will assist existing start-ups in the precision fermentation and cultured meat and seafood space to develop and commercialize their products. The facilities will include biofermentation capabilities and a product development lab.

Meatable enters joint development agreement with DSM

Dutch cultured meat start-up Meatable and Royal DSM, a nutrition tech company, will work together to reduce the cost of growth medium used in cultivated meat production. Growth medium is a liquid that contains proteins, growth factors, and vitamins that cells need to grow, and it is often the priciest component used in creating cultivated meat. In addition to working on growth medium, the companies “will focus on the development of meat-like taste and texture of the final product, which are important factors influencing the purchase decision of consumers.”

Change Foods open up R&D facilities in Silicon Valley

Precision fermentation start-up Change Foods announced it has opened up new R&D facilities in life science incubator BioCube. BioCube has established itself as one of the longest-running and well-respected incubators in Silicon Valley, with alumni such as Impossible Foods. Change Foods has set its sights on creating vegan cheese with the same stretch and melt of real cheese as its first product, and will use its new facilities at BioCube to accelerate those efforts.

Enough begins construction on world’s largest alt. protein facility

Scotland-based Enough (previously 3F Bio) produces an alternative protein made from mycelium called ABUNDA. The company just started construction on a 15,000 square meter factory in the Netherlands, which according to the press release, is set to be the largest factory for alternative protein in the world. The production facility will be able to produce approxiameltely 10,000 metric tons of mycoprotein per year.