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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

3D printed meat

Redefine Meat Launches 5 “New Meat” Plant-Based Proteins in Israel

Plant-based meat company Redefine Meat announced five new products are now available at select Israeli restaurants and hotels. The “New-Meat” line consists of Redefine Burger, Redefine Ground Beef, Redefine Lamb Kabob, Redefine Sausage, and Redefine Cigar (a classic Middle East dish that wraps meat in pastry).

As we’ve covered before:

Redefine Meat uses 3D-printing technology along with ingredients it calls “Alt-Fat,” “Alt-Muscle,” and “Alt-Blood” to create whole cuts of plant-based meat that mimic animal-based meat. The company has also mapped out 70 sensorial parameters that let it control factors such as texture, juiciness, fat distribution and mouthfeel.

It should be noted that the products Redefine announced today are not whole cuts, but rather ground versions of meat. This is a pretty standard way for plant-based meat companies to enter the market because replicating the structure of animal meat with plants is way more difficult than creating a minced product.

And like Impossible Foods, Redefine Meat is first going to restaurants with its new plant-based meats. It’s “New-Meats” are available at: Hudson, Nam, Asif Center, Eddi’s Hideout, The Lounge, Sinta Bar, C2, Guesta, Joz & DanieBudega, and American Kitchen.

Redefine plans to expand New-Meat availability to Europe in Q4 of this year followed by U.S. and Asian expansion in 2022.

The entire plant-based meat space is getting more sophisticated and moving beyond burgers (pardon the pun). Juicy Marbles introduced its (expensive) plant-based filet mignon in March of this year. In January of this year NovaMeat, which also uses 3D printing technology to create meat analogues, received €250,000 (~ $307,500 USD at the time) from the Spanish government and announced a collaboration with Disfrutar, a two-Michelin star restaurant. Other players in the 3D-printed plant-based meat space include fellow Israeli companies MeaTech and SavorEats (both of which are publicly traded on the Israeli stock exchange).

At the beginning of this year, Redefine Meat announced a partnership with Israeli meat distributor Best Meister and followed that with a $29 million Series A round of funding. The company plans to debut its whole cuts of plant-based meat at the end of this year, following pilot tests.

Aleph Farms Makes a Cultivated 3D-Bioprinted Ribeye Steak

Israel-based startup Aleph Farms and its research partner, the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Israel Institute of Technology, said today that they have developed a cultivated 3D-bioprinted ribeye steak. The steak contains muscle, fat, and structure identical to what would be found in a steak from a cow, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

To create the cultivated ribeye steak, a technique called 3D bioprinting was used. This is different from 3D printing because living cells, which have been extracted from living animals, are actually printed. Once the living cells are printed, they are incubated to grow and interact to form tissues and structures identical to those found in a steak from an animal. Other companies that use 3D printing to produce meat alternatives, like NovaMeat and Redefine Meat, print plant-based proteins and fats.

In 2018, Aleph Farms unveiled a cultivated thin-cut steak. At the time, the steak was not produced using 3D bioprinting, and Aleph Farms was limited to making its first product just a few inches long and a few centimeters thick. At the end of last year, the company shared that it had created a platform for the commercial production of its cultured meat, called BioFarm, which the company hopes to have fully operational by 2022.

It is still early into 2021, and in addition to Aleph Farms’ news, there has already been a plethora of cultured meat news. At the end of January, NovaMeat announced that it had created the world’s largest piece of 3D-printed cultivated meat. Mirai Foods raised $2.7 million a few weeks ago to accelerate the commercialization of its cultured meat. Eat Just made headlines at the end of last year with its first commercial sale of cultured meat.

Aleph Farms says now that it has successfully created an entire steak it can essentially create any shape and type of steak. In the press release, the company shared that it will continue to expand its portfolio of cultivated meat products.

Redefine Meat Announces Distribution of 3D-Printed Meat Through Israeli Meat Distributor

Redefine Meat, producers of 3D-printed meat made from plant ingredients, announced this week its new partnership with Israeli meat distributor, Best Meister. This new partnership will enable Redefine Meats to distribute its 3D-printed meat products throughout Israel. Additionally, the two companies hosted a tasting through a food truck in a small town outside of Tel-Aviv, Israel to introduce the public to its products.

According to the press release, the strategic partnership with Best Meister will enable Redefine Meat to brings its 3D printed meat to market in Israel sometime in the first quarter of 2021. The company plans on first distributing its products to high-end restaurants and butchers.

The pilot tasting gave Redefine Meat an opportunity to receive feedback from consumers on its alternative meat product. The food truck tasting offered customers, who were unaware that the products were not animal meat, a variety of traditional Mediterranean dishes that showcased the 3D-printed plant-based meat. The dishes were served with minimal condiments and toppings so the flavor and texture of the 3D-printed meat could come through on its own. Around 600 customers came to the tasting and over 1,000 dishes were served, causing the tasting to sell out in five hours.

Redefine Meat creates its 3D meat from three different components, including what the company calls Alt-Muscle, Alt-Fat, and Alt-Blood. The company’s patented 3D printer layers these three ingredients to create the realistic texture of muscle and tissue. Through this process, the company can develop different cuts of beef, lamb, pork, and other species.

In Israel, Redefine Meat is not the only 3D-printed Meat company; SavorEats is another Israeli 3D meat startup that went public last year on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. In Spain, NovaMeat produces 3D printed meat made from plant ingredients, with products ranging from steak and pork. Last summer, KFC Russia made the announcement that it would begin developing methods to produce 3D-printed chicken nuggets.

Although 3D-printed meat is currently not a permanent menu item in restaurants or a grocery store staple, Redefine Meat’s successful tasting and new partnership may bring this alternative meat closer to these channels.

Meat-Tech Says it has 3D Printed Cultured Beef Fat Structure

Meat-Tech, a publicly traded (TASE: MEAT) Israel-based cultured meat company, announced today that for the first time it successfully 3D-printed a cultured beef fat structure composed of bovine fat cells and bio ink.

The bovine fat cells and bio ink were created from stem cells in Meat-Tech’s labs. Meat-Tech says its edible bio ink helps “create an accurate, digitally-printed structure by supporting 3D printed cells.” The edible structure Meat-Tech announced today reached a height of 10 mm, which is larger than previous versions of 3D-printed meat the company has produced.

Meat-Tech’s milestone comes on the heels of news earlier this month that the company had closed a $7 million round of funding and had started the process of filing for an IPO in the U.S.

The 3D-printed cultured meat space has certainly heated up in the past few months. Fellow Israeli company SavorEats announced just today that it had raised $13 million by going public on Israel’s stock exchange (where Meat-Tech is also traded). And at our Smart Kitchen Summit in October, Spanish startup NovaMeat revealed that it has been 3D-printing hybrid cell-and plant-based meats.

There is still some debate around the efficacy of cultured meat as a whole. Pat Brown, CEO of Impossible Foods thinks that mass market cultured meat never going to happen. But that is not stopping the startups looking to prove the un-cultured wrong. Future Meat is looking to bring costs down by using fibroblast cells as its starter cells. Super Meat launched a restaurant that serves its cell-based chicken meat. And Eat Just, which is also developing cell-based meats, expects it will take 15 years before cultured meat to reach the “Coca-Cola phase” of ubiquity.

There is still a lot to happen for cultured meat to move from the lab to our dining tables including technology, scaling and even governmental regulation. But announcements like the one from Meat-Tech today show that slaughter-free meat is getting closer to reality.

See 3D Meat Printers, a Pizza Robot and The Modernist Cuisine Kitchen in Action at SKS

Every October, one of my favorite things about the Smart Kitchen Summit — the Spoon’s flagship conference for food tech leaders — is getting to see the latest and greatest technologies in the world of food on display.

Over the years that’s included everything from smart ovens and waiter robots to 3D-printed popsicles as entrepreneurs bring their latest creations to Seattle to show off what they’ve been building and to meet other food tech innovators.

And while nothing can replace getting to see (or taste!) the latest product that could change the world of food and cooking in person, one of the limitations of a physical world conference is what can actually be physically transported to Seattle. Sometimes, it’s just not feasible to get a product — or something like a tech-powered kitchen — on a plane.

But with Smart Kitchen Summit virtual, we can go anywhere in the world to where creators are building their innovations, from the a lab to the kitchen and into a barn. (All of these will happen this year.) And we can have a food tech innovator show us what they’re building first-hand.

Here are some of the things you can expect at SKS this year:

  • Novameat CEO Giuseppe Scionti will show us in a live demo how his company is making plant-based 3D-printed meat.
  • We’ll see a cultured seafood lab in California, food dispensing pods in Maine and food robots in India during our Startup Showcase.
  • We’ll get a guided tour of the Modernist Cuisine kitchen with the Modernist’s head chef, Francisco Migoya.
  • A new restaurant pizza robot will debut live on camera.

Not only that, with the built-in networking features of SKS Virtual, you’ll get to meet, ask questions and even have one-on-one video chats with many of the innovators at SKS 2020.

SKS starts next Tuesday, so get your ticket here. If you’re attending from overseas and can’t watch live, don’t worry: your SKS ticket will get you access to Spoon Plus, where we’ll host all the videos from SKS.

Don’t miss out on seeing the latest in food tech. Get your ticket today and we’ll see you at SKS!

SavorEat Plans to Build an Appliance For The Home That Prints & Cooks Meat

“That’s our goal,” said Vizman when I caught up with her via a zoom call. “Where we can also have, next to a microwave, we can have machines that you know can create variety of products.”

But to get there, first her company is working on building a product that can print and cook food instantly for a large quick service food chains, starting with one of the biggest in Israel, BBB (Burgus Burger Bar).

“We are about to start this testing it in their facility within a year, while we believe that we will be commercialize it in a larger scale two years from closing the financial round that we are now running.”

That financial round Vizman is looking to close is a $3.5 million seed round led by a company called Next Food, an Israel based food tech investment fund. Next Food led SavorEat’s pre-seed round of $1.75 million.

3D printed meat has gained momentum over the past couple years, especially, it seems, in Israel. SavorEat joins two other venture funded Israel based 3D meat printing startups in Redefine Meat (formerly Jet Eat) and Meatech, a company which prints cultured meat cells into steak.

Two things set SavorEat’s technology apart from those and other 3D meat printing startups. The first is the company’s binder, which is a proprietary plant-based cellulose. The cellulose is combined with other ingredients such as plant-based fats and protein to make the final product.

“We’re using the cellulose to bind a variety of fats and proteins and other tastes and flavors and combine a very stable emulsion,” said Vizman.

The other big differentiator for SavorEat’s technology is that it prints and cooks simultaneously, which allows the company’s printers to make a fully cooked piece of 3D printed meat like you might see produced by a futuristic appliance like that in the TV show Upload.

The food comes out “ready to be eaten,” said Vizman. “We’re printing one layer, then we cook one layer, print one layer, cook one layer. So at the end, you get something that’s ready to be consumed.”

This print and cook technology, according to Vizman, will give the cook a high degree of precision of over the final print.

“The nice thing about that is that you can also control the way you cook it. You can decide whether you want it medium, you want in rare, well done. How you want to cook it in the you want to grill it from the inside and rare from the outside.”

The company’s technology was invented by Oded Shoseyov, a serial inventor and entrepreneur who spends much of his time spinning out new ideas from his research lab at Hebrew University. Shoseyov is SavorEat’s chief science officer. Shoseyov and Vizman are joined by other executives from companies like Stratasys (3D printing) and IFF/Frutarom (flavors).

The full interview with Vizman, where we go in depth on the company and its technology, can be read below if you are a Spoon Plus subscriber. Find more information here about subscribing to Spoon Plus.