Fat is sexy, don’t you know? In particular, the type of fat made without killing any animals.
One company working on such a fat is Cultimate Foods, a Berlin-based startup developing cultivated fat for hybrid alt-meat products. The company announced it has raised a pre-seed €700 thousand round led by Big Idea Ventures, ProVeg International, and Realum.cloud.
According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Cultimate plans on targeting its cultivated fat at food companies interested in developing hybrid plant-based meat products. The company, which claims its cultivated fat replicates the structure of animal fat tissue, says it uses a “unique technological approach to 3D cultivation creates the structure of their ingredient and reduces the costs of production.”
“Our ultimate goal is to deliver a game-changing ingredient for the plant-based meat industry,” said Cultimate cofounder George Zheleznyi. “We are focused on developing the most important part of meat experience, fat. Cultimate will deliver all the properties of meat that are currently lacking in the available meat alternatives.”
Zheleznyi previously cofounded a Russian-based alt-meat startup called Greenwise. His cofounders at Cultimate include Eugenia Sagué (co-CEO, ex-ProVeg) and Oskar Latyshev (CTO, ex-Partner M).
Cultimate enters an increasingly crowded market for alt-fat products. San Francisco-based Mission Barns raised a significant round last year to help it scale up its cell-cultured fat, and Steakholder Foods (previously MeaTech 3D) is also working on a cultivated fat for its 3D-printed alt-steaks.
Cultimate says it plans to use its new funding to validate its cultivated fat product and begin to prepare for pilot-stage production.
