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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Future Food

The Supplant Company’s Fiber-Based Sugar Launches in the U.S.

When it comes to growing major crops like corn, rice, wheat, and sugar cane, there is often an abundance of raw material left over post-harvest. Referred to as agricultural side streams, this material includes things like husks, leaves, cobs, and stems. Traditionally, industrial agricultural side streams have not had much use, but upcycling food waste and a focus on a circular economy have garnered a lot of attention in the past few years. Now, more and more companies in the food tech space are upcycling food waste and agricultural byproducts to create something new. One such company is The Supplant Company.

The Supplant Company was founded in 2017 by Dr. Tom Simmons, who holds a Ph.D. in Plant Science. The company upcycles agricultural side streams and uses the fiber from these materials to create its sugar. Stems, stalks, and cobs — parts of the plant that would otherwise go to waste — are the primary ingredients for the sugar.

On a phone call at the end of last week, Simmons said that enzymes produced by fungi are used to break down the long complex chains of sugar found in fibrous materials. From there, the shortened chains can be more easily converted to sugar.

Regular white cane sugar does not contain fiber and has a high glycemic index, which causes blood sugar spikes. Since Supplant’s sugar is made from a base of fiber, it has a lower glycemic index than cane sugar, has fewer calories, and is also prebiotic, according to the company. Sugar obviously provides sweetness, but it can also contribute to the texture of certain foods, like baked goods for example. The Supplant Company said that its sugar behaves the same way as cane sugar in baking, cooking, and caramelizing.

Since there is so much excess raw material leftover from industrial agriculture operations, other companies besides Supplant are also finding uses for side streams. Comet Bio is also upcycling farm waste like stalks and husks to create sweeteners and supplements. Kokoboard uses agricultural waste in Asia, including coconut husks, peanut shells, and rice straw, to create construction building boards. Nestlé launched a product called Nescafé Nativ Cascara this year, a carbonated soft drink that uses the coffee berry fruit surrounding the coffee bean which is typically discarded.

This past Friday, June 18, Supplant debuted its fiber-based sugar in the U.S. in partnership with Chef Thomas Keller. The sugar was used to make vanilla ice cream and chocolate sprinkles, and was offered at Keller’s California and New York restaurants over the weekend. Supplant is currently working with consumer brands, restaurants, and chefs to expand its product throughout the U.S. market.

Horizon Europe Allocates €32M for Sustainable Protein Research

Horizon Europe, a European Union funding program for research and innovation, announced today that it has €32 million in funding available for research into more sustainable protein options such as cultivated meat and plant-based alternatives. The program works to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and this is the largest funding package set aside specifically for sustainable proteins to date.

There are three project categories supported by Horizon Europe’s funding for researchers to take on:

  1. Fill in the gaps of nutrition, safety, and allergenicity of alternative proteins, and then assessing the environmental footprints of these products. Budget – €11 million.
  2. Develop sustainable protein crop systems and value chains with the facilitation of best practices between farmers
    Budget – €9 million
  3. Focus on food environments and aim to ensure that consumers are able to make healthy and sustainable food choices when at restaurants and supermarkets. Budget – €12 million

Food security is a global issue because of a continuously expanding population and climate change. By 2050, it is estimated that 9.7 billion people will inhabit the planet, yet the resources and land available for food production on Earth are finite. To feed this many people, we would have to double the current amount of food production. According to the Good Food Institute, plant-based meat alternatives use 47-99 percent less land than conventional meat. The same report by GFI stated that 77 percent of all available agricultural land is used for animal agriculture, yet animal agriculture only supplies 17 percent of the world’s food supply. This type of inefficiency would make it challenging to achieve the food requirements needed by 2050.

The Good Food Institute Europe, along with 21 other organizations, sent a letter to the European Commission imploring them to consider allocating funding for the research and development of more sustainable proteins. This isn’t the first time governments have stepped up to provide funding for this type of research. The Spanish government granted BioTech Foods €5.2 million ($6.3 million USD) at the beginning of 2021 for the company’s cultured meat project, which consisted of investigating the health benefits of cultured meat. NovaMeat also received €250,000 (~ $307,500 USD) in funding from the Spanish government, at the beginning of the year to further develop its 3D printed meat alternatives. In the U.S., UC Davis received a $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to research cultivated meat last September.

The Horizon Europe program will run until 2027, and those interested in applying for grant money through Horizon Europe for these three projects can apply here.

Motif FoodWorks Raises $226M to Improve the Taste of Plant-Based Proteins

Plant-based food tech company Motif FoodWorks has raised a whopping $226 million in Series B funding, according to an announcement sent to The Spoon. The round was co-led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, through its Teachers’ Innovation Platform, and BlackRock. Rethink Food and existing investors also participated in the round. To date, Motif has raised $345 million.

The company says its new funds will go towards three areas: research and development; scaling and commercializing its food tech; and expanding its number of people and facilities.

Through all of these areas, Motif’s underlying goal is to improve plant-based foods by developing novel food ingredients that lead to better texture, mouthfeel, and taste in products. The company does this via a mix of microbial engineering and precision fermentation.

Motif, which was spun out of bioengineering platform Ginkgo Bioworks, moved into its own facility in the Boston Seaport area last year, where it is focusing on R&D efforts. Meanwhile, just last month, the company announced it had acquired extrudable fat technology from private research firm Coasun to use in mimicking fat textures in plant-based meats. Additionally, Gingko is licensing prolamin technology from the University of Guelph. The prolamin tech will improve the texture of plant-based cheese so that it can melt, bubble, and stretch as easily as its traditional counterpart. 

This massive Series B fundraise comes at a time when retail sales of plant-based foods surpassed $7 billion. Even so, there’s room for improvement. Research from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and Earth Day Network found that 44 percent of consumers surveyed “don’t like the taste of plant-based foods.” However, two out of three said in the same research that they would be “willing to eat more plant-based foods instead of meat if plant-based foods tasted better than they do today.”

Fermentation technology, sometimes called “the third pillar” of alt protein, is a way to bridge the taste gap between traditional and plant-based meats. Ingredients made with biomass and/or precision fermentation can be combined with plant-based ingredients to achieve the kind of meat and dairy analogues that taste and feel as close to the real thing as possible.

Other companies, including Perfect Day, Change Foods, and Clara Foods are all working towards this goal, too.

Animal-Free Dairy Startup Change Foods Closes $2.1M Seed Round

Change Foods, a startup best known at this point for making animal-free cheese via a fermentation process, has closed an oversubscribed Seed round of $2.1 million. Investors include Plug and Play Ventures, Clear Current Capital, Canaccord Genuity, Better Bite Ventures, Jeff Dean, and GERBER-RAUTH, among others. To date, Change Foods has raised $3.1 million in funding, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The company, founded in 2019, has up to now been split between Palo Alto, California and Melbourne, Australia. In the wake of this new funding, Change Foods is setting up a new R&D facility in the San Francisco Bay Area and company founder David Bucca has already relocated there.   

The company plans to bring its first product — animal-free cheese — to market in 2023.

Precision fermentation is one method within the larger fermentation category. For Change Foods, involves fermenting microorganisms such as yeast or filamentous fungi with sugar to produce the cells for specific functional ingredients — fats, vitamins, flavoring agents, and enzymes, to name a few. (Precision fermentation is also used to create insulin.) Perfect Day and Impossible Foods are examples of major alt-protein companies that use this process to get their products.

An animal-free cheese made via this method has the potential to be one of the first animal-free cheeses to appeal to the non-vegan crowd. Up to now, numerous companies have tried their hand at plant-based cheeses. Few have gotten the flavor and texture close enough to the real thing to win over masses of consumers. Motif Foodworks, the food tech spinout of synthetic biology company Gingko Bioworks, is the other notable company developing cheese products through precision fermentation. 

Traditional cheese requires a significant amount of land and water to produce, puts it right up there with meat in terms of food items consumers should ideally cut back on or find outright replacements. To realistically counter that, alternatives will have to taste less like cashew or legumes and more like actual cheese. Precision fermentation may eventually be a highly efficient way to do this at scale, hence new investments like this one now going towards the space.

Better Meat Co. Completes Its Production Facility for Fermented Mycoprotein Ingredients

Plant-based ingredient maker Better Meat Co.’s new fermentation plant, which will produce the company’s mycoprotein ingredient Rhiza, is up and running as of today in Sacramento, California, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Rhiza is a fungi-based protein analogue with a naturally meaty texture and neutral taste. Because it is a whole food, it requires less processing than, say, pea protein, to get a meat alternative customers would actually want to eat. Better Meat Co. says the product can be used either on its own, as a complete replacement for meat, or as a “meat enhancer” that gets blended with traditional protein. 

To get Rhiza, the company uses a fermentation process where fungi feeds on a basic crop such as a potato to create a biomass that can be harvested with minimal processing. The process is similar to those of Quorn or Enough, companies that also use fermentation-based mycoprotein production. 

Since Better Meat Co. is a business-to-business company, it will sell Rhiza to food companies that can use it in their own products. Adding an ingredient like Rhiza to an existing meat product can improve the latter’s overall nutritional profile. For example, it could reduce the amount of cholesterol typically found in a traditional burger patty. The company also claims its product has more iron than traditional beef, more protein than eggs, and more fiber than oats.

The new facility in Sacramento will include both lab and office space. It will primarily serve as a R&D facility in addition to producing “thousands of pounds of finished product per month,” according to today’s news release. 

The Food Tech Show: Upside’s Eric Schulze on the Intertwined Nature of Regulatory and Product Development in Cell-Based Meat

Back in 2016, Eric Schulze was working as an FDA regulator and happened upon a Reddit article discussing Memphis Meats’ cell-based meatball prototype. He was immediately fascinated with all the possibilities and challenges the company would encounter over the next few years.

Schulze reached out to the company’s cofounder and CEO, Uma Valeti. Memphis Meats (now called Upside) was looking for a scientist to help start the company’s embryonic cell line development and Schulze had the skills for the position. Before long, he was on his way to New York City where Valeti was giving a speech at the United Nations.

“I ran across Manhattan in a suit,” Schulze told me in a conversation on Clubhouse. Valeti “was of course poised and ready to go on stage. We had a great talk. He went back in and gave his talk. I accepted and I moved out to the west coast sight unseen.”

Schulze’s role in the company would eventually grow to encompass not only leading the company’s cell-based meat design, but also heading up regulatory oversight, an evolution that was very intentional and by design.

Valeti “made me a deal,” said Schulze. “He said, ‘You help me get the cell division off the ground. We’ll we’ll hand it off to someone later. But also, can you in parallel start thinking about how and how we’re going to build this regulatory system.”

You can hear the story of that early meeting, the thinking behind why Memphis changed its name to Upside, why the company chose chicken as its first product and much more on the latest episode of the Food Tech Show podcast.

Just click play below or find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

MeaTech 3D Files a Patent for Printing More Cultivated Meat

Bioprinting startup MeaTech 3D has filed a patent with the United States Patent Office (USPTO) it says could significantly improve the manufacturing process for its cultivated meat.

The Ness Ziona, Israel-based company has since 2018 been developing a method for cultivated meat that relies on 3D bioprinting. Cells are extracted from the animal (without harming it) and transferred to bioreactors, where they multiply before getting differentiated into different cell types, such as fat and muscle. That process is, with some variation, akin to just about any company developing cultivated meat right now.

Where MeaTech’s method starts to differ is when the bio-inks come into play. The bio-inks are formed from the cell types mentioned above, like muscle and fat, and scaffolding material, which provides structural support cells can adhere to as they grow and mature. Once the inks are loaded into a 3D bioprinter, they are printed to, in MeaTech’s own description, “assemble cells as they would be found in a conventional cut of muscle.” The printed product is incubated to form tissue and eventually become a full cut of meat that goes to the consumer. 

Needless to say, nobody’s buying full cuts of steak from MeaTech on store shelves at the moment. The company has so far only printed a carpaccio-like layer of meat, which is considerably thinner than a ribeye-sized cut of meat. It will likely be years before the latter emerges as an actual product, though MeaTech has recently announced a pilot production facility that will help in this process.

The company’s main competitor in this area is Aleph Farms, also based in Israel. Earlier this year, Aleph said it had developed a 3D-printed ribeye cultivated steak. Elsewhere, however, many cultivated meat companies continue to focus on unstructured meat like grounds, nuggets, and patties.

MeaTech says the patent filed for this week will give the company more control during the printing process, increase printing speeds, and allow for a greater variety of inks. The end goal, of course, is to improve the manufacturing process overall in order to get the company closer to making whole cuts of meat. 

  

Could Alterna-Ice Creams Eclipse Traditional Ice Cream?

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After five months of non-stop news about cell-based meat, things were a little slow in the alternative protein space this week. Phew! The whole cultured meat category (and our editorial team) could use a breather. With this pause, we can take a moment to talk about something truly important: ice cream.

It’s just about summertime, and the hotter weather and longer days means I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream made from alternative ingredients and don’t have animal-based dairy products in them!

As my colleague, Ashlen Wilder pointed out this week, there are more vegan ice cream options than ever in the freezer aisle, and these options taste better than ever. But to make a good ice cream replacement, you can’t just make something that tastes good. The hard part for alterna-ice creams is the texture, the creaminess. Too often, traditional ice cream replacements fall flat because they have a gritty or crystallized texture. It’s like the uncanny valley where they get so close to the real thing that any slight flaw is exaggerated.

Thankfully, the new wave of alterna-ice creams is also getting better re-creating everything we love about ice cream. Of all the ones I’ve tried, Eclipse is my favorite. This plant-based ice cream is not only delicious, but also has that creamy texture that makes ice cream such a decadent treat. Eclipse’s vanilla is so perfect in its simplicity that eating it is truly sublime, IMHO.

I was actually envious of Ashlen because this week she got to try some of the new summer flavors Eclipse is launching next month. (Had I known about this sample offer, I would have totally pulled rank.) In June, Eclipse is releasing mango passion fruit, strawberry fields, mint chip, caramel butter pecan, the dark side of the spoon (chocolate, peanut butter cookie dough, and fudge chunks), and cookies n’ cream. I’m going to assume that they’re all going to be delicious — and expensive. Eclipse ain’t cheap, costing $11.99 per pint.

Another vangaurd in alternative ice cream is Brave Robot, which uses Perfect Day‘s dairy protein made from microflora. As such, Brave Robot ice cream falls into a unique category because technically it contains dairy proteins. It’s just that those proteins don’t come from a cow (so those with dairy allergies or complications should take heed).

I tried Brave Robot last year and while it was tasty, there was definitely a texture issue — there was an ever-so-slight chalkiness about the product. As a result, I haven’t bought it since, or given it as a gift to my ice cream-loving family and friends. That could also be because Brave Robot isn’t cheap either, costing $58 for a four-pack.

Being able to nail non-animal-based ice cream isn’t just a matter of taste preference. There’s big money to be made in ice cream. According to the International Dairy Foods Association, ice cream is an $11 billion industry in the U.S., and that the average American consumes about 23 pounds of ice cream a year. Plant-based alternatives are a small, but growing subsection of the total ice cream market. The Good Food Institute reported this year that the U.S. plant-based ice cream and frozen novelty category is worth $435 million, and that sales of such products grew 20 percent in the past year and 32 percent over the past two years.

There’s an opportunity for these alternative ice cream companies to stake their claim and garner your loyalty as the category grows. They just need to do so at an affordable price point. If Eclipse and Brave Robot and whomever else wants to innovate in the space can do that — we can all scream for more.

Do you have a plant-based ice cream recommendation? Drop us a line and let us know!

Image via Bowery.

More Headlines

Vertical Farming Company Bowery Raises $300M in Series C Funding – The funds will fuel further development of the proprietary technology setup that powers Bowery’s network of vertical farms.

Jack Bobo on Why Some Alt-Protein Products Hit the Zeitgeist and Others Fail – Long-time food industry consultant and author of the new book “Why Smart People Make Bad Food Choices“ says it’s a matter of timing and what customer segment you are targeting at a particular evolutionary stage of a market.

Nutrition Brand Muniq Aims to Support Gut Health and Close Gaps in Health Disparities – Muniq produces what it calls prebiotic glucose control shakes, which are essentially meal replacement shakes with specific ingredients added to support gut health.

Delivery Has a Small But Vital Role When it Comes to Normalizing Cultivated Meat

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Setting aside scalability, price parity, and regulatory approvals for a moment, one of the major challenges for cultivated meat makers will be getting people to actually buy their products en masse and on a regular basis.

We’ve written before about restaurants being a critical step in this journey, and after this week, I would add restaurant delivery to that process, too. The industry-wide shift to delivery wrought by the pandemic forced the restaurant biz to get pretty creative in terms of what it can do with delivery. Similar energy could be put towards delivering consumers an entire education about cultivated meat, not just a meal in a box.

There’s currently only one company in the world that’s even allowed to sell cultivated meat in restaurants right now — Eat Just, which nabbed the first-ever regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat at the end of 2020 and subsequently started selling its GOOD chicken product at Singapore restaurant 1880. The San Francisco-based Eat Just has since struck a deal with Delivery Hero’s food panda service to deliver meals from 1880. This week, Eat Just announced (among other things) that it is doing something similar with JW Marriott Singapore South Beach’s Madame Fan restaurant. To start, GOOD chicken dishes will only be available from Madame Fan with delivery orders.

When I talked to Eat Just’s CEO Josh Tetrick this past week, he was admittedly a little more blasé about delivery than I’m being at the moment: “It just was kind of as simple as, ‘It’d be nice if people could eat meat without slaughter in their homes. So let’s do delivery.'” Delivery Hero happens to be an investor in Eat Just, and food panda happens to be one of Asia’s biggest delivery services. Those convenient factors made delivery something of a no-brainer for the company to pursue.

But Tetrick also pointed out that delivery is part of the overall process of getting cultivated meat out of the lab and onto our plates. “Start with regulatory approval,” he said. “Then it’s getting on a menu. Then it’s having a family sit down and have a chicken dinner together. Then you can go to a retailer and buy [it]. All these things create a context in which this idea of making meat — which seemed like it was some futuristic thing a year ago — suddenly becomes a way that people just eat meat.”

Restaurants have historically played a role in the evolution of what we eat. But thanks to the forces at work, both technological and pandemic-related, restaurants are no longer just in-person experiences between the four walls of a dining room. If there was one idea that’s been dissected ad infinitum over the last year, it’s that the word “restaurant” now encompasses a far wider range of experiences. One of the biggest is delivery.

The pandemic accelerated rather than created delivery’s popularity, which means as a meal format, it won’t go by the wayside anytime soon. Numbers may taper off a bit as the world reopens, but many consumers have already said they will continue to order delivery on a regular basis. That makes it an integral part of the restaurant industry that anyone looking to enter the biz needs to pay attention to. Like cultivated meat companies.

If we go by the example Eat Just/GOOD have set, that involves more than putting some lab-grown chicken bites in a cardboard box. Tetrick said that delivery for the Madam Fan deal will operate similar to what his company did with its original 1880/food panda deal. Customers can choose from a few different dishes (chicken and rice, katsu curry, etc.). Meals are delivered to customers along with a Google Cardboard viewer and a link to a 360-degree short film about meat. Tetrick described the film as follows:

“You you put the glasses on and you’re in the midst of a rain forest in South America. Then it transitions to the rain forests being removed, and you see that it’s connected to planting lots of soy and corn. And you see how the soy and corn is connected to feed going to animals, and you see how that’s connected to your plate and how we could do something different.”

The point is to help consumers familiarize themselves with the term “cultivated meat” and explain why it matters for the health of the plant (more food made with fewer resources) and how that big-picture context fits into each individual consumer’s life, whether they’re in Singapore or Tennessee.

Longer term, immersive experiences like the above could help with what’s something of an end game for cultivated meat: getting people to think of it as just meat. Not “lab-grown meat” or “slaughter-free” meat or any of the other descriptors floating around nowadays. Just regular ol’ meat from regular ol’ animals.

It’s significant, then, that Eat Just’s deal with Madame Fan will deliver cultivated meat that actually replaces its conventional counterpart on the menu. In future, says Tetrick, restaurant menus will still offer some plant-based options (for those who can’t eat animals for ethical and/or religious reasons). But in his mind, “it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have both cultivated meat and conventional meat on the menu.”

“I think you’ll end up having restaurants all across the world transition,” he added.

Not tomorrow, mind you. As I write this, global demand for meat is up. There is also a huge difference between letting someone taste something as a one-off experience and getting them to order it on a regular basis. As more companies attempt to scale up — often to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — they will need to start educating their prospective consumers on what the heck this stuff is and why we need it in the first place. Choosing the right restaurant partners and getting the actual chefs involved will be important for this, too, as well sending the right messaging to each different demographic.

Food delivery may be one small step in this process, but given its ubiquity right now, it’s a crucial one to get right.

Elsewhere in the Restaurant Biz . . .

Top Three Takeaways from Our Food Robotics Summit – The Spoon’s Chris Albrecht gives some thought to the future of robots, including restaurant robots, in his wrap-up from our latest event.

Take on Big Pizza by Supporting Bitcoin – An investor/entrepreneur has launched Bitcoin Pizza, a pop-up restaurant brand that will partner with independent pizza shops to deliver pies from May 22–29. Proceeds in part go towards supporting independent restaurants.

On-Demand Pay App DailyPay Raises $500M in Capital – The on-demand payment service for restaurants and retailers has secured $500 million in capital and will use it to expand to new markets.

SOUND Nutrition Uses Ultrasonic Waves to Craft Protein Bars

Protein bars are seemingly now a staple in the American diet. This packaged food is a preferred snack of everyone from athletes to those who work in the office all day. As a rock climber, I’ve chomped down more protein bars than I would have liked to, but they are truly a convenient approach to fueling up on a strenuous day. After trying countless new bars on the market, I’ve come to realize that many taste the same, and don’t actually provide the satiation promised. A start-up called SOUND Nutrition is stepping in to disrupt the idea of what a protein bar is through the creation of its product called a SOUND Bite.

SOUND Nutrition takes a radically different approach to making protein bars; the company uses high-frequency, low-amplitude ultrasonics, or sounds waves, to form its bars. Roberto Capodieci, the CTO of Sound Nutrition, invented the technique of ultrasonic cutting as a way to eliminate waste in food production for a major snack manufacturer. Later on, he discovered this technology could be used to gently vibrate dry ingredients into a shape without the use of high heat. Now, this is what Sound Nutrition uses to shape its powdered ingredients into an oval-shaped bar.

I spoke with David Cho, the CMO of SOUND Nutrition, and he said one benefit to using sounds waves to form the bars is that no fillers or binders are needed. Other bars use ingredients like dates or brown rice syrup to bind the bar together, but this is not necessary for Sound Bites. Cho said that this technology also affects the flavor and texture of the ingredients, and provides a rich, buttery flavor. Because the bars are never baked or heated, this supposedly also preserves the nutritional quality and flavor of some of the ingredients.

SOUND Bites comes in four different flavors: Coconut Surprise, Vanilla Lime, Mocha, and Chocolate Raspberry. Different protein isolates, like soy or whey, are commonly incorporated into protein bars, but Sound Nutrition uses whole egg crystals and cream cheese powder instead to up the protein content. Rather than added natural or artificial flavors, ingredients like lime juice powder, ground vanilla, and raspberry powder are used to create the different flavors of Sound Snacks. Each bar contains only 1 gram of sugar, and the only sweetener used is allulose, a sugar-free sweetener.

The protein bar market is huge, and it is expected to reach $7 billion USD by 2027. Out of all of the protein bars in existence, as far as we know, Sound Nutrition is currently the only company using sound waves to produce a food product. Cho did say that the company has plans to use this technology to create additional product lines in the future.

SOUND Nutrition officially launched a few months ago, and its bars are currently available for purchase only on its website. SOUND Bites come in packs of two, and each pack is available in a case of 12, costing $72. The company is offering a special sample case for a limited time, which includes four SOUND Bites packs in each flavor for a total of $24.

Update: SOUND recently dropped the product price, and SOUND Bites are now $20 for the sampler EP and $60 for the case of 12 packs. 

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Raises $170M, Brings Its Cultivated Meat to More Restaurants

Eat Just announced today that its GOOD Meat division has raised $170 million in new funding. The round included UBS O’Connor, Graphene Ventures, K3 Ventures, and others, and officially makes GOOD a subsidiary of Eat Just.

The company said today it plans to use the new funds to increase capacity of GOOD’s cultured meat production in addition to furthering research and development. 

Eat Just became the world’s first company to receive regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in December of 2020 in Singapore. It quickly followed that up with the actual sale of GOOD meat at the 1880 restaurant in the city-state. Since then, 1880 customers have continued to order GOOD’s cultivated chicken product at the restaurant, and can now even get it for delivery via foodpanda.  

With the new funds, Eat Just will expand the availability of GOOD’s cultivated meat from that single restaurant to another, the JW Marriott Singapore South Beach’s Madame Fan. Notably, the JW Marriott location has said it will outright replace its conventional chicken with GOOD’s cultivated version at certain times of the day. To start, GOOD meat will replace conventional chicken for delivery items ordered on Thursdays, starting May 20. GOOD will be available “for once-a-week dine-in starting soon.”

Eat Just CEO and founder Josh Tetrick has said before that he sees a world in which “restaurants remove conventional meat from their menu[s].” Eat Just’s plant-based egg products have already fully replaced their traditional counterparts at some restaurant chains, and more restaurants around the world are now exploring alternative protein as a regular staple on the menu.

For cultivated meat, the march into restaurants won’t happen overnight. Eat Just remains the only company in the world that can currently sell cultivated meat, and Singapore is still the only place in which the company can do that. However, other countries and companies are already in the process of granting and getting regulatory approval, which means in the next year or so, we’ll see more restaurant menus around the world debuting cultivated meat products.

Mosa Meat Achieves an ‘Over 65x Reduction’ in Costs for Its Cultured Fat

Dutch cultured protein company Mosa Meat said over the weekend it has reduced the cost of its fat media by 66 times thanks to the work of a group the company refers to as its Fat Team. Without listing actual price numbers, Mosa Meat said its fat medium now costs 1.52 percent of what it did less than two years ago, in September of 2019.

In the cultivated meat-making process, the nutrient-rich growth medium fed to cells triggers those cells to grow into muscle, fat, and tissue, all of which are put together to create a final end product. A company might grow fat cells for use in its own meat analogues, or it could sell the fat as an ingredient to other businesses. Fat is also a crucial component in achieving a “meatier” taste, texture, and mouthfeel when it comes to cultured protein.  

Mosa Meat, of course, is well known as the company that created the world’s first cultivated hamburger back in 2013 — for a cool $325,000. A huge part of this cost was (and still is for many) the growth medium, which at the time was made using fetal bovine serum (FBS). FBS is as expensive as it is controversial. As the Good Food Institute puts it, “The use of animal-derived components in cultivated meat production has prohibitive economic, food safety, and ethical constraints.”

In July of last year, Mosa Meat said it had achieved a more than 80x cost reduction for its growth media, a milestone largely driven by the company’s ability to develop FBS-free media. The company now uses an “animal component free” media that is part of the reason the Fat Team was able to announce its own cost reductions recently.

“We’ve definitely checked yet another box on our journey towards a product that meets the expectations of critical meat lovers,” company cofounder Peter Verstrate said in this weekend’s announcement. 

Mosa Meat’s announcement comes not long after MeaTech 3D, an Israeli company, said it would produce cultivated fat at a new pilot production facility. Additionally, last month Mission Barns raised $24 million to build up a production facility in San Francisco for its cultivated fat business. Meanwhile, multiple companies, from Avant Meats to Future Meat, have announced price slashes in production costs over the last several months.

Lowering costs, whether of fat, medium, or other components, will help the entire cultured meat industry get products closer to price parity with their traditional counterparts. Price parity is only of many other milestones that have to be achieved in order to make cultivated meat a commercial reality. However, it is seen by many as an extremely crucial step in the process. 

Mosa Meat doesn’t yet have a timeframe for when it might have burgers in front of customers, or how much they’ll cost once that happens. At last check, the company was working with European regulators to get approval for its products.