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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cultured Meat

Singapore: Eat Just and foodpanda Partner for Cultured Meat Home Delivery

Alternative protein company Eat Just and delivery service foodpanda announced a partnership yesterday that will see the two companies offer the world’s first home delivery of cell-cultured meat.

The program kicks off on April 22 in Singapore, where Eat Just made the world’s first sale of cultured meat in December 2020 at restaurant 1880. For the new program, customers will be able to order dishes from 1880 featuring Eat Just’s GOOD Meat cultured chicken for home delivery via foodpanda.

Yesterday’s announcement is noteworthy because it marks the first time consumers will be able to eat cell-based meat from the comfort of their own homes. Up to now, cultured meat has only been available to consumers via exclusive taste-testings like those at Supermeat’s kitchen lab in Israel, where customers offer feedback on dishes instead of payment. 1880 remains the only restaurant in the world right now to have made an actual sale of cultured meat.

Wider acceptance of cultured meat are coming, though. Cultured protein is being heralded as a way to fight climate disaster, since it requires fewer resources (land, water) than traditional animal agriculture. And startups around the globe have received massive amounts of funding of late, including Eat Just, who recently raised $200 million. Other cultured meat startups raising funds include Future Meat, Mosa Meat and CellMEAT.

Before more sales (and deliveries) can happen, though, cultured meat needs to get regulatory approval from more governments, and ideally needs to reach price parity with animal based protein.

For those in Singapore inside 1880’s delivery radius, GOOD Meat dishes available include Chicken & Rice with coconut rice, pak choi, sweet chili, chrysanthemums, microgreens; Katsu Chicken Curry with jasmine rice, heritage carrots, micro shiso, edible flowers; Chicken Caesar Salad with kale, romaine, edible flowers, shaved radish, plant-based Caesar dressing.

GOOD Meat and foodpanda said they plan to collaborate with other restaurants in Singapore, too. Starting in mid-May, GOOD Meat selections from JW Marriott Singapore South Beach will be available.

Cultured Decadence Raises $1.6M to Make Lobster in a Lab

Wisconsin-based cellular agriculture company Cultured Decadence announced today it has raised $1.6 million in an oversubscribed round of pre-seed funding. Investors include Bluestein Ventures, Joyance Partners, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, gener8tor, GlassWall Syndicate, Bascom Ventures, and China-based Dao Foods. The company also received non-dilutive funding from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation administered by the Center for Technology Commercialization (CTC). 

Cultured Decadence will use to the new funds to create what it says will be the first cell-cultured lobster meat in North America. This financing follows work by Cultured Decadence in developing novel cell lines and reducing the cost of its cell-culture media. Cell-culture media is typically one of the key elements driving up the cost of a cultured meat product, so any company making progress on this step is good news for the whole industry.

Lobster may be the first dish Cultured Decadence is recreating in a lab, but the company said its technology can be applied across a range of seafood analogues, including carp, shrimp, and scallops. The goal is to help decrease the planet’s reliance on traditional seafood. Overfishing, ocean pollution, and human rights abuses are just a few of the issues plaguing the industry, and they were around long before “Seaspiracy” hit Netflix.  

The promise of cell-cultured seafood is that it doesn’t require the actual ocean to produce — a point underscored by Cultured Decadence’s Wisconsin headquarters, which is thousands of miles away from any major body of water. 

The company joins Singapore-based Shiok Meats in the quest to provide more sustainable lobster meat to consumers. Shiok unveiled its lobster meat to the world for the first time at an invite-only taste-testing event in 2020.

Besides today’s, other recent fundraises in the cultured seafood space include Avant Meats’ $3.1 million round, also in December 2020, and BlueNalu’s $60 million fundraise in January 2021. While all of these companies focus on different products and specific processes, they share the end goal of advancing the cultured seafood industry, which is still an extremely nascent one.

Cultured Decadence said it would use the new funds to continue developing its lobster prototype and eventually launch commercially. No specific timeframe was given. 

Cell Ag Startup Mission Barns Raises $24M for its Cultivated Fat

Mission Barns, a cellular agriculture startup creating cultured fat, announced today that it has raised a $24 million Series A round of funding. Investors in the round include Lever VC, Gullspang Re:Food, Humboldt Fund, Green Monday Ventures, and Enfini Ventures. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Mission Barns to more than $28 million.

Mission Barns is focused on cultivating animal fat, just without the animal. The company’s technology starts with pork, poultry or beef cells and grows them using plant-based feedstock in a cultivator. The result, the company says, is an animal fat that brings the same mouthfeel and flavor of meat without animal slaughter, and does so in a more environmentally friendly way than conventional animal agriculture.

Mission Barns has developed its own meat as well as in collaboration with other meat and plant protein partners. The company says applications include bacon, breakfast patties, burgers, nuggets, and more. In August of last year, Mission Barns held curbside taste tests of its cell-based bacon outside restaurants in San Francisco and Oakland, California.

The alternative fat space has steadily been growing over the past year, with a number of startups developing their own technology. Here in the U.S., Motif Foodworks is developing its own plant-based fat. Hoxton Farms is working on cultivated fat in the U.K. And in Australia, Nourish Ingredients is using yeast fermentation to create plant-based fat.

In today’s press announcement, Mission Barns says that it will use the new funding to scale up its production and build a pilot production facility in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick on What It Will Take to Normalize the Concept of Cultured Meat

Will we ever reach a day when fast food restaurant serve nothing but plant-based or cultured meat? Many hope so, including Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Eat Just. But Tetrick’s ambitions for alternative protein stretch far beyond the QSR sector.

As of this writing, Eat Just is selling its cultured meat product at a restaurant in Singapore (where it got regulatory approval late last year). Stateside, the company has sold enough of its plant-based egg product to equal 100 million chicken eggs, and has been rapidly expanding throughout the restaurant industry.

As to wether we’ll ever see a day where the plant-based restarant is the norm, there are a lot of steps needed to get there. Tetrick and I chatted recently about these along with many other topics on the alt-protein front. Always a wealth of information when it comes to this subject, Tetrick explains what exactly it will take for cultured meat to reach parity with traditional meat, how experience matters when introducing it to consumers, and why he hops we reach a day when cultured meat becomes boring.

You can listen to the interview read the transcript of our conversation below. Note that the transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. 

Jenn Marston: You’ve had a few different announcements in the last few months around JUST getting into more restaurants. Do you ever see a point where we’re going to have restaurants, and I mean, big restaurants, McDonald’s, or, you know, Starbucks or something, only offering alternative proteins on their menus?

Josh Tetrick: I think that one, if we don’t get to that point — similarly if we don’t get to a point where every car dealership only sells an electric car — that our planet will not be in a good state 30 years, 50 years, 100 years from now. So before I tell you what I think it should happen, I’ll say I think it’s a necessity that it does happen, given the urgency that we have around oceans, rain forests or [the danger of] another zoonotic disease outbreak. 

I don’t think it will only be plant based. I see a world in which restaurants remove conventional meat from their menu. So they remove fried chicken, they remove hamburgers, they remove steaks or remove fish, they replace it with cultivated cultured meat. And some restaurants end up having plant based on the menu. That’s what the restaurant menu in the next 10, 20, 30 years will look like. I don’t think there’ll be a need for conventional meats. 

When you have actual meat cultivated, it doesn’t require slaughtering animals. So we’ve done a lot of really important research around this particular topic. [We did a lot of work] in Singapore, looking at restaurant operators and surveys and I’ll give you one finding from that: About 80 percent of restaurants said that they would put cultivated cultured meat on their menu. And about 70 percent of people said that if [cultured meat] meets the tastes and the cost demands, there would be no reason to have conventional meat on the menu at all. So I think that’s what you’ll see. And I think there will always be people that want plant. My girlfriend Shelley is a good example. I gave her some my chicken and she almost spit it out. She said, ‘I don’t want something that tastes like an animal.’ And I think there’ll be a lot of people like that. And that’s okay.

Jenn Marston: I definitely know some people who, if it tastes too much like the real thing, they don’t want anything to do with it. So that’s definitely a good point.

Josh Tetrick: I think it was a combination of [the product] literally being an animal, not a plant. It tastes very much like an animal. But it literally being an animal, combined with it tasting just like an animal was too much for her to take.

Jenn Marston: On the subject of cultured meat, there have been a ton of developments since we last spoke, including Eat Just serving customers in Singapore.

Josh Tetrick: You know, we’ve served almost 300 people, but 80 percent of the people said they feel good about eating it, about 70 percent of the people who paid for it say they’d be open to substituting [cultured meat] for not only conventional meat, but even plant based. So we’re going to be expanding to more restaurants and building a larger manufacturing facility in Singapore to make sure that we’re able to meet all the [demand].

Jenn Marston: Why did you choose Singapore? Was it just that Singapore was most realistic to get regulatory approval first? Or is there something about that specific market you were interested in? 

Josh Tetrick: There’s a few reasons. Their regulatory approach is often very evidence-based. The more science- and evidence-based you are, the less politics are involved. Second reason is that Singapore is a global melting pot. You have people from all over the world there. So when you’re wanting to learn how consumers think about this, why they like it, why they don’t like it, what is causing them to hesitate, you get lots of different cultures. Within those 300 people, we got people from all over the world, young, old everywhere in between. That’s another important reason. And then the third reason is, you know, more people consume meat in Asia than anywhere else in the world. So that was, that was another important reason why we chose Singapore.

Jenn Marston: Is it is the plan that get into more restaurants next? 

Josh Tetrick: It is.

Jenn Marston: It seems like there is a lot of hype happening right now around cultured meat. And it seems like a lot of folks are very confident that cultured meat is gonna just explode very, very quickly. What do you think of some of these comments about it’s going to reach price parity quickly, it’s going to scale up very quickly. 

Josh Tetrick: Well, there are a lot of factors involved. So I guess I’ll just start with the things that I think are certain, then I’ll go to things that are higher and lower probabilities. 

What is certain is that cultured meat will eventually get to the price and then below the price of conventional animal protein. I do feel certain about that. 

The next [issue] is when we’ll get there [to parity] — a year or five or 15 years. This is where there is not 100 percent probability. But I would say more likely than not, that in the next 10 years, this production process will get below the cost of chicken. Now, in order for that to happen, other things need to happen. And those other things include more countries allowing for the sale of [cultured meat]. If you can only sell in Singapore, your market is restricted to the million plus people on the island. You’re not going to be producing tens of billions of pounds, which is what is ultimately required to get to the kind of efficiencies necessary to get below the cost of chicken. 

And then the third thing has to do with where we are in the US. I can’t tell you whether we are going to get regulatory approval this year or not, or whether [regulators are] going to approve it ’22. I think it’s more likely than not that we’ll see clearance sometime in the next two years. I hope it’s this year — we’re going to be ready if it is. But it’s hard to tell. A lot of companies will go out of business trying to get there. [Making cultured meat] is incredibly capital intensive, it is not easy. It is not straightforward. It requires hundreds and millions of dollars, if not a billion-plus dollars in investment, ultimately, to get there. It’s not for the faint of heart. And much like electric car production, you’re not going to have tens of thousands of companies making electric cars. You might have tens of thousands of companies making different sub components of electric cars, you know, the engine, the battery, the software.  But we only get to have a handful of companies doing the whole thing. I think that is very analogous to the cultured meat industry. 

The final thing I’ll say is, it is one of the real bright spots for us of what’s happening in Singapore. It’s one thing to talk about where production costs are going if you’re only making stuff for your friends and family and boyfriend and girlfriend and your fancy investors. That was the case for us up until we got clearance, and it’s the case for every other company. It’s another thing when you need to scale up to meet the demands of hundreds and thousands, then 10,000, then a million people. You learn a lot about producing more when you actually can produce more. So there’s going to be a ton of learnings that happen. As that scale up process happens, some things might be surprising on the downside, and some might be surprising on on the positive side, but we’ll learn as we make that happen.

Jenn Marston: How challenging is that? Part of getting consumers on board with this is obviously not just price parity, but also parity around taste and texture and the actual product. So how difficult has has that been for you all?

Josh Tetrick: Certainly at some point, whether it’s 5, 10 years (I sure hope it’s not 30 years), cultured meat will be below the cost of traditional meat. The second thing that I am certain about is we’ll eventually get to the point where not a single person can tell the difference because there’s literally no difference at all. Today, in the work that we’ve done, about 70 percent of the people think it tastes as good or better than traditional meat. There’s still a lot of work we want to do on texture. We’re going to be rolling out a chicken breast, which is a more advanced structural product.

But even if we solve for taste and texture, there’s also consumer perception: the feelings, the ideas that make people want to buy the product. It’s a confusing process, making cultured meat. It’s an unnatural process. I’m not saying these things are right, I’m just saying this is what a consumer feels. And I think ultimately, you could get your costs right, you get the taste and texture just perfect. But you’re still left with the most important thing: Do the consumers want to buy your product. The process of lab-grown meat might be holding them back. So it’s really important that we address that stuff. Now. We built a brand around addressing that stuff head on. We know many consumers will think it’s unnatural. That’s okay, let’s deal with it. And we want to deal with it by explaining our process, contrasting it to the conventional meat-making process. Eventually, having a digital platform allows consumers to really interact with stuff a little bit more, so they can get familiar with it. We need to normalize this method of production, so it’s not so opaque to consumers. When it’s confusing, their brains will naturally jump. In the case of cultured meat, many brains will naturally jump to, ‘This just isn’t natural.’ And we have found quite a stark difference between consumers over the age of 20 and consumers under the age of 20.

Jenn Marston: Yeah, I get a lot of a lot of folks who just look at me like I’m crazy when I asked them if would you eat meat grown in a lab, but I think it’s, you know, what more do we do to sort of educate consumers? How do you start talking to everybody in a way that’s going to make it have the same appeal, as, say, Doritos?

Josh Tetrick: A big component is allowing people to experience it. So I’ll use a car analogy. Imagine I was in Birmingham [Alabama, where he grew up] and I was talking to some of my friends and I said, ‘Would you would you want to drive a pickup truck doesn’t have an internal combustion engine? Would you be down with buying that?’ I’m almost certain my friends would say, ‘Hell no.’ But then Tesla comes out with that pickup truck that I saw them demoing. If my friends could go to a Tesla store in Alabama, get into that truck, and take it on the back country roads, then there’s an experience of something and there’s a perception change.

The most important thing we think you can do to change perception is allow people to experience in a concrete way, not in a theoretical abstract way. We need to get out in front of more people, right, more restaurants and more retailers and allow people to have the ability to actually access their other meat analogues. 

The second thing is, I think you need to talk about this in a way that is not so technical that you lose people, but is concrete enough where you’re not hiding things from people. And that’s the hard balance. Because the more you unpack, the more you’re being open about it. But the more you unpack, sometimes people can just get lost in the science. It’s about finding the right balance of not getting so technical that people’s eyes just glaze over, but concrete and technical enough that people don’t walk away from that interaction thinking something has been hidden from them. That balance applies whether it’s a label interaction or commercial interaction or menu interaction, or a one to one interaction. One thing that we’ve actually found to be effective is to say, ‘Yes, it is true, the meat is made in a large stainless steel [container], that true statement.’ That statement can be both a little off-putting to people and a little liberating to people. But when you contrast that to how conventional meat is produced, people tend to feel a little bit better. So I think, experience number one, people just got to experience that. And then two, I think talking about in a way that is a little bit more relatable.

Jenn Marston: Something that I think there’s a huge need for more of translating the science into something that isn’t gonna insult folks intelligence or lied to them, but it is also going to, you know, the average person needs to be able to understand it.

Josh Tetrick: Especially if some of our folks are over the age of 20, if you describe the process of culturing meat, the vast majority will say it is strange. And I think the first step to effectively communicating is to acknowledge that is true. To most people, it sounds bizarre, it sounds strange. That’s okay. Let’s now let’s deal with it. Right?

Jenn Marston: Yeah, exactly.

Josh Tetrick: The more we effectively address it, the more we move [the industry] forward. For example, I understand why my mom would think it’s strange. In her mind, meat has been made her entire life (and the history of humanity) by slaughtering an animal and then cutting up their flesh. Cultured meat is different. Let’s just acknowledge that.

And what we’ve seen in other industries and with other products is that something that can be strange can also at some point in time be normalized, and can end up being pretty boring. And eventually, I want [cultured meat] to get to the point where people are sitting down at restaurants or go into grocery stores, and they don’t even have conversations about it anymore. They’re just like, yeah, I want some chicken. Sounds good. Do you have any chicken left in the freezer? Right? Yeah. There doesn’t need to be this philosophical engagement.

I think I think the truth is that whether it’s [about] not slaughtering an animal or an environmental reason, or a zoonotic disease reason, I guess all these things kind of are wound up in, “How does it make a person feel?” All of them — sometimes individually, sometimes in combination — I think, for most people, make them feel better about eating it. But I do think you have to talk about things like health, not using antibiotics, to some extent food safety. Often those things can be a bigger driver than sustainability or animal welfare. With that said, and this was a surprising result from the research that we did, the primary purchase driver, both for US consumers, and consumers in Singapore, was the fact that they could consume this meat without slaughtering an animal. Now, they might have correlated that with lots of other things like food safety and environment. So it might not have been looked at like it’s just like a purely independent variable. But I did find that to be interesting. But yeah, I mean, you have to talk about in a way that people can relate to. If I’m talking to my mom about this (my mom is not vegan or vegetarian), I would focus on you know, ‘Mom, you know, the fried chicken used to make me so it tastes like that. And it’s gonna have less antibiotics, that stuff you want and you’ll probably feel a little bit better by the day.’ That’s probably what I would say to my mom. That’s what I actually have said to my mom.

TurtleTree Scientific Partners With JSBiosciences to Develop Cell Culture Media at Commercial Scale

TurtleTree Scientific, the B2B arm of cellular ag company TurtleTree Labs, announced today a new partnership with JSBiosciences to collaborate on the development of cell culture media. The overarching goal of the partnership is to bring down the cost of production for cell-cultured products in order to eventually achieve commercial scale.

Singapore-based TurtleTree Labs is best known for its technology that produces human milk from mammalian cells. The company launched its TurtleTree Scientific arm earlier this year with the goal of creating food-grade growth factors for cultured protein products.

Finding a growth media that is accessible, affordable, and that doesn’t rely on animals to get remains one of the biggest challenges for cultured protein companies. Some companies are now trying to distance themselves from the use of the controversial fetal bovine serum (FBS), but alternatives are few and far between, not to mention wildly expensive. 

JSBiosciences is a valuable partner in this area because it already has a successful track record of developing mammalian cell culture media at a large scale. The company will provide TurtleTree with food-grade basal media and media formulation services, with the goal of getting “upstream” production costs low enough to allow for commercial-scale production of cell-cultured products, starting in Singapore.

This is the second major partnership for TurtleTree Scientific so far in 2021. Last month, the company announced a collaboration with biotech company Dyadic International. Through that partnership, the two companies are developing recombinant food-grade growth factors for proteins that can be grown in high yields at lower costs in bioreactors.

Cell-Cultured Fish Startup Bluu Biosciences Raises €7 million

Bluu Biosciences, a startup making cell-based fish, has raised a €7 million (~$8.24M USD) round of funding. TechCrunch was first to report the news, writing that Manta Ray Ventures, Norrsken VC, Be8, CPT Capital and Lever VC all participated in the round.

The Berlin, Germany-based Bluu is working on creating cell-based versions of salmon, trout and carp. Though there are more companies tackling the creation of cell-based beef and chicken, there is an emerging wave (pardon the pun) of startups making cultured fish protein. Bluu is focused on salmon, trout and carp. Here in the U.S. BlueNalu is working on cell-based mahi-mahi and bluefin tuna. And in Asia, the Hong-Kong-based Avant Meats is developing fish maw and sea cucumber, while Singapore-based Shiok Meats is making cultured shellfish.

Funding for cell-based protein startups continues to be heavy. A recent report from the Good Food Institute found that cultured meat startups raised $360 million in 2020. Just this week, Eat Just, which makes cell-based chicken that is actually for sale in Singpaore, raised an additional $200 million.

While cell-based fish products aren’t for sale yet, they are getting closer to market. BlueNalu is building out its pilot production facility, which will make 200 – 500 pounds of commercial grade cultured fish. Shiok plans to have it shrimp commercially available by 2022. And Avant recently announced a 90 percent cost reduction in the production of its fish maw.

All of this funding and progress is helping narrow the availability window of cultured meat products with some experts predicting it will hit price parity with traditional animal protein in five years.

‘Premium’ Cultured Meat Company Orbillion Bio Joins Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 Class

Startup accelerator Y Combinator has made its first investment in a cultured meat company with the addition of Orbillion Bio to the Winter 2021 cohort. Prior to joining YC, Orbillion participated in both the Brinc accelerator and Big Idea Ventures NYC program.

Orbillion’s focus is on cultivating higher-end meat products such as elk, lamb, and Wagyu beef. To develop these products, the company runs multiple cell lines through bioreactors, screening the cells and isolating those best suited to commercial food scale production. Machine-learning software helps pick out the best tissue and media combinations with which to make meat analogues.

The company told TechCrunch this week that its first product will be a Wagyu beef product that will be more of a minced product than a whole cut of steak. Orbillion plans to get that product into the market in 2023, though in what capacity (e.g., a restaurant) the company did not say, nor did it elaborate on which market.

The goal is to eventually provide the kinds of craft meats one would purchase not from the grocery store but from a high-end butcher shop. 

The focus on high-end meats may allow Orbillion’s products to reach price parity with their traditional counterparts sooner than other cultured meat companies. The company also says it wants to bring the cost of its products down even further, so that they actually become more affordable than traditional high-end meats. That idea is in keeping with recent comments entrepreneur/investor Jim Mellon shared with The Spoon, that meat made via cellular agriculture will eventually become more affordable than traditionally farmed meat.

Nor is Orbillion the only company veering away from the usual chicken, pork, and beef staples and developing premium cultured meats. Vow, in Australia, develops cultured meat products from a library of cells that includes kangaroo, alpaca, and lamb, among others. The company raised $6 million at the beginning of 2021.

For its part, Orbillion aims to get a pilot plant up and running by the end of 2022, which the company says will take roughly $3.5 million.

Alt-Protein Could Be a $290B Market by 2035. Parity Matters for That Growth

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The market for alternative protein, including meat, eggs, dairy, and seafood products, could reach at least $290 billion by 2035, according to a new report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Blue Horizon Corporation (BHC). The report, entitled “Food for Thought: The Protein Transformation,” was released this week and finds that the market for alternative proteins — including plant-, microorganism-, and cell-based analogues — will grow from its current 13 million metric tons per year to 97 million metric tons by 2035.

In a best case scenario, the report also said alt-protein will make up 11 percent of the overall protein market by that time. However, to hit that point, and to realistically compete with the multi-trillion-dollar traditional meat market, alt-protein sectors have more work to do when it comes to reaching parity, and not just around price, either.

Parity, both in terms of price and in the taste and texture of the products, is essential for alt-protein gaining wider acceptance among mainstream consumers, and “Food for Thought” sees the sector achieving it in three different stages: 

  • Plant-based alternatives, including meat, dairy, and egg substitutes, will achieve parity in 2023 or possibly sooner.
  • Alt-proteins made from microorganisms, such as fungi, yeast, and algae, will reach parity by 2025.
  • Cultured proteins are slated to reach parity by 2032.

Price parity comes up a lot in conversation these days. The plant-based protein sector, for example, is well on its way to achieving it, as evidenced by Impossible’s recent price slashing of its products and its chief rival Beyond Meat doing something similar last year.

For cultured meat, too, many are saying products will reach price parity with traditional meat sooner rather than later. Longtime investor and entrepreneur Jim Mellon, for example, recently told The Spoon he believes cultured meat will achieve price parity with traditional meat within five years. And we have seen a few announcements from cultured meat makers in the recent past about bringing production costs down. At the beginning of this month, Hong Kong-based Avant Meats said it had achieved a 90 percent reduction in the cost of producing cultured functional proteins. Earlier this year, Future Meat’s CEO Rom Kshuk told me his company has decreased production costs “by 1,000 times over the last three years,” with a quarter-pound serving of its cultured chicken breast now costing $7.50 to produce.

Lower production costs can lead to lower prices for consumers, but it’s important to reiterate that in the context of BCG and BHC’s new report, parity encompasses more than price. Speaking of the report, in it BCG managing director and partner Benjamin Morach referenced taste and texture in addition to price when discussing parity. “Alternative proteins must taste and feel as good as the conventional foods they replace and cost either the same or less,” he said.

Hence, cultured meat not reaching full parity until 2032, according to the report’s predictions. While this is definitely longer than five years, it’s actually shorter than the “north of 15 years” figure Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick offered up last year when talking about the time frame for cultured meat being available everywhere and for a low cost.

Expect more, not fewer, predictions around parity as investment in alt-protein, and especially cultured protein, continues and more companies bring products out of the lab and into the consumer realm.

As to why we need all this alternative protein, the BCG/BHC report highlights some important factors, including its role around more environmentally responsible production and consumption. According to information provided to The Spoon by BCG/BHC, a $290 billion alt-protein market will free up 240,000 square kilometers of land, decrease the number of chickens in factory farms by 50 billion, reduce water use by 38 billion tons, and drop CO2 emissions by 1 billion tons. Producing more alternative protein is also in alignment with multiple of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The BCG/BHC report comes on the heels of recent numbers from The Good Food Institute, which found that $3.1 billion was invested in the entire alternative protein sector in 2020. That’s triple the amount invested in 2019, and an encouraging sign for a sector whose role in the global food system is no longer a nice-to-have but a must-have in order to feed 10 billion people while attaining net-zero emissions by 2050.

In Other Alt Protein News . . .

Netherlands-based cultured meat startup Meatable raised $47 million in Series A funding this week. It will use its new funds to advance small scale production at the Biotech Campus Delft and diversify its product lineup.

Eat Just closed a $200 million funding round and will use the new funds to build out its cultured meat products as well as accelerate research and development while expanding internationally.  

Alt-protein investment firm Big Idea Ventures is taking applications for Cohort Four of its startup accelerator program. Companies developing either alternative proteins or supporting technologies and ingredients are encouraged to apply.

Eat Just Closes $200M Funding Round

Food tech company Eat Just announced today it has closed a $200 million funding round led by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), which is the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar. Charlesbank Capital Partners and Vulcan Capital also participated in the round, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. Eat Just’s total funding to date now exceeds $650 million.

San Francisco-based Eat Just said it will use the new funds to “build capacity for Eat Just’s pioneering products,” which presumably means the company’s cultured protein business GOOD Meat. Funds will also go towards accelerating research and development programs and continuing to expand internationally.  

Speaking of that international expansion, the funding news comes on the heels of Eat Just expanding distribution of its plant-based egg products north of the border, into Canadian retail and foodservice outlets. The company said in today’s press release it will bring its egg product to “millions more” retail and foodservice locations in 2021. 

Stateside, Eat Just officially debuted its JUST folded egg product in breakfast sandwiches at Starbucks and Peet’s this year. 

Most worth watching is the company’s continued development of its cultured meat business Good Meat. Eat Just won the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured meat at the end of 2020, and followed that milestone up by actually selling its cultured chicken product at a restaurant in Singapore.

The company said today that it will “dramatically” lower production costs for its cultured meat, which is a goal for many these days. The company says cultured meat could become a $13 billion market by 2030 and that GOOD Meat’s chicken is on a path to price competitiveness with conventional chicken by that time. 

The new funding will also be used to scale Eat Just’s commercial manufacturing operations, and further develop other types of meat in addition to its existing chicken product. 

Cultured Meat Startup Meatable Raises $47 Million Series A

Dutch cultured meat startup Meatable announced today that it has raised a $47 million Series A round of funding. Investors include Dr. Rick Klausner, Section 32, Dr. Jeffrey Leiden, and DSM Venturing, with participation from existing investors including BlueYard Capital, Agronomics, Humboldt, and Taavet Hinrikus. This brings Meatable’s total funding raised so far to $60 million.

Founded in 2018, Meatable’s technology allows it to grow meat from a single cell quickly, without the need for the controversial fetal bovine serum. As we wrote back in 2019:

They do this by using pluripotent stem cells, which can proliferate faster than regular stem cells and are malleable, meaning they can be coaxed to turn into any type of animal cell (muscle, fat, etc). Meatable claims that with its unique technology it can make large batches of animal tissue cells in a matter of days to weeks, whereas most companies need months.

All that speed comes at a cost, however. Meatable told TechCrunch that its meat currently costs $10,000 per pound. Obviously a price that high is untenable, but thankfully, there are a number of startups around the world working to bring the price of cultured meat down through various methods. In Israel, Future Meat announced this year that it has brought the price of its chicken down to $7.50 per quarter pound, a big milestone in the industry. If current industry predictions hold true, cultured meat could reach price parity with animal meat in five years.

Meatable’s funding continues the funding hot streak for cultured meat startups in 2021. Other cultured meat companies that have received funding rounds so far this year include BlueNalu, CellulaREvolution, and fellow Dutch startup Mosa Meat.

Meatable says that it will use its new funds to advance small scale production at the Biotech Campus Delft and diversify its product lineup.

Startups: Applications Are Open for Big Idea Ventures’ Alt-Protein Accelerator

Alt-protein food tech accelerator Big Idea Ventures (BIV) announced this week that it is now taking applications for its fourth cohort. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, the five-month-long program will take place in three locations this time: New York, Singapore, and Paris.

For these accelerators, Big Idea Ventures looks for companies developing both plant-based and cultured protein products and ingredients. Food tech companies related to the alt-protein space are also encouraged to apply.

Beside $125,000 in cash investment and $75,000 on in-kind investment, chosen companies also get access to coworking space, including test kitchens, for the duration of the program, as well as mentorship and networking opportunities. Companies will also get to interact with BIV’s limited partners, a group that includes AAK, Bühler Group, Givaudan, Tyson Ventures, and others. 

Chosen companies will ideally have an initial product already validated through sales and ready to scale. On the program’s website, BIV says it is looking specifically for companies developing plant-based products, cellular ag companies, ingredient creators, and those making enabling technologies. 

Because of the pandemic, cohort four will be remote as of this writing. This is a tactic that’s been used by other food tech accelerators over the last year, and a trend that will likely continue for the foreseeable future. For BIV participants, this is actually advantageous, as the organization says companies can leverage resources from all three programs, even if they are only enrolled for one.  

Those interested in applying to BIV’s program can do so here. Applications are taken on a rolling basis, which means the sooner the better in terms of turning one in.

“Cell-Cultured” Is the Best Way to Describe Seafood Grown in a Lab, According to Key Industry Players

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has published comments from key players in the cell-based seafood space around what to actual label the stuff when it is finally cleared for sale to consumers (h/t Food Navigator). Consensus is building around “cell-cultured” as the most effective descriptor.

The original call for comments was sent out towards the end of 2020, and yesterday was the cutoff date for responses. Among those who weighed in on the discussion were BlueNalu, Finless Foods, and Memphis Meats, all companies currently developing cell-cultured seafood or meat products. 

The comments underscore the importance of choosing the right name for a food type that still strikes many average consumers as something out of science fiction. When plant-based meat arrived in grocery stores, the labeling battle was usually less about convincing consumers and more about doing battle with Big Meat over use of certain words. Cultured meat’s big challenge, for now, is trying to concisely but effectively explain the concept of “protein grown from animal cells in bioreactors” to consumers. 

Whatever label is settled on will have to convey several things at once to consumers. It will have to make clear that the product is safe, that it is real meat (aka not vegan), but that it is different from traditional animal-based protein in terms of how it is produced (e.g., cell cultured versus wild caught). Based on the comments submitted to the FDA, labels for seafood should also factor in food transparency, adherence to food industry protocols (e.g., allergen alerts), and should not disparage traditional meat products. 

Of the companies and individuals that responded to the FDA’s call for comments, the majority back the term “cell-cultured” when it comes to labeling seafood products. Meanwhile, the majority of commenters suggested a move away from terms like “clean meat” and lab-grown meat.”

Finless Foods’ nine-pager of a comment concluded that:  

At the highest level, Finless Foods advocates for and strongly supports an accurate, non- misleading, and descriptive label that clearly outlines what the cell-cultured products are, including species and product form, and how they are made, in a way that is uniform within the cell-cultured seafood category and consistent across categories. Therefore, we recommend that FDA adopt and memorialize the use of the term “cell-cultured” through the mechanism of a CPG or a letter to industry to provide appropriate guidance.

Citing a forthcoming Halman and Halman study, the Center for Science in the Public Interest said:

Based on the results of the two Hallman and Hallman studies, CSPI finds that both “cell-cultured” and “cell-based” would inform consumers of material facts and not be misleading, as well as portray the product in a neutral fashion. FDA should closely consider these options, and other peer-reviewed studies, in addition to conducting its own studies before making a final decision on its final label phrase. 

Memphis Meats said it supports “disclosure of the term ‘cell-cultured,’ in conjunction with the name of the conventionally-produced seafood product, in the statement of identity or name of cell-cultured seafood products.” The Berkeley, California-based company also noted in its comments that “Terms that specify the type of seafood product (e.g., ‘fillet,’ ‘steak’) should be permitted in the name or statement of identity of a cell-cultured seafood, as long as the term appropriately describes the particular product. “

The Vegetarian Resource Group brought up the issue of consumer education in its comments, stating that, “Use of a term such as ‘engineered using cultured seafood cells’ would help consumers understand that the product is based on seafood and that seafood cells are used in production. An educational program would need to be developed to inform consumers about the meaning of ‘cultured’ in this context.”

You can read the full comments here, many of which delve into some of the more subtle issues that existing in the labeling debate. For example, one anonymous commenter suggested “cell-built” seafood to factor in the use of 3D printing technology.

Interestingly, less than one year ago, Rutgers released a study that found “cell-based” to be the best descriptor for seafood products grown in a lab. “Cell-cultured” was a close runner up in that particular study, which suggests consensus has been building for some time around the evolution of “cell-cultured” seafood.