Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

bioreactor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Cuppa Joe Grown in a Lab? That’s Right, Cell-Cultured Coffee Is Now a Reality

Cellular agriculture has given us hope about the future of sustainable meat production, but what about coffee? After all, many of us (this author included) would happily give up that great steak or burger to make sure we get that first cup of coffee in the morning.

Well good news, caffeine addicts: A research lab in Finland announced they have made coffee using cellular agriculture techniques. According to an article today in Phys.org, the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland “is developing coffee production through plant cells in its laboratory in Finland. In the process, cell cultures floating in bioreactors filled with nutrient medium are used to produce various animal- and plant-based products.”

The process by VTT includes establishing the cell lines in the lab and then transferring the cell cultures to a bioreactor where they produce biomass. Once harvested, the biomass is roasted into something resembling the coffee we purchase from the store.

“In terms of smell and taste, our trained sensory panel and analytical examination found the profile of the brew to bear similarity to ordinary coffee,” said VTT Research Team Leader Dr. Heiko Rischer. “However, coffee making is an art and involves iterative optimization under the supervision of specialists with dedicated equipment. Our work marks the basis for such work.”

While we’ve seen a few startups such as Atomo working on building “molecular” coffee, those approaches use upcycled plant-based ingredients with similar compounds to coffee beans. VTT’s research project is the first example we’ve seen of cellular agriculture techniques used to replicate coffee bean cells in a bioreactor.

Whether it’s cell-ag coffee beans or derived using molecular magic, discovering new approaches to create coffee is urgent given the state of traditional crop farming. Mega-producers like Brazil face severe droughts due to climate change, which has resulted in big jumps in coffee bean prices.

But don’t expect coffee from a bioreactor to show up on store shelves anytime soon. First, researchers must figure out how to scale the process, and regulatory approval would be needed.

You can see the full article on Phys.org here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s What Needs to Happen for Cultivated Meat To Hit Price Parity in 5 Years

Our Future Food newsletter is back. Each week we’ll look at trends in cultivated meat, plant-based proteins, precision fermentation & more, so make sure to subscribe & get in your inbox.

Over the past year, more and more of those invested in the future of cultivated meat are saying price parity with traditionally farmed meat products is achievable in 5 years.

This includes Jim Mellon, who told me on a recent episode of The Food Tech Show that not only will meat derived using cellular agriculture hit price parity with traditionally produced meat in half a decade, but over time it will be more affordable than plant-based alternatives like the Impossible Burger.

This is a big deal, because while many of the earliest proponents of lab-grown meat may be motivated by environmental, food safety or animal cruelty concerns, the vast majority of consumers are much less idealistic. For most of us, the primary calculus when buying food remains a result of the same three variables: price, taste and convenience.

But can we really get to price parity in half a decade? I mean, it’s one thing to predict low-priced meat from a bioreactor, it’s another to have it widely available at the same price as farm-raised meat anywhere at anytime.

The short answer is yes, if we can build the infrastructure for the production of lab grown meat. This means moving beyond today’s bench top prototypes and pilot production facilities to fully scaled industrialized production facilities worldwide.

What will it take to get there? Experts agree there are a few major challenges to the development and industrialization of cultivated meat, including: Development of cell lines, cost and performance of growth media, bioprocess optimization and better bioreactor design, and production of complex meat cuts.

Cell Line Development

The process of manufacturing cultivated meat begins with acquiring and banking cell lines. According to Clare Trippet, the chief science officer for CPI who spoke at the Agrarian Revolution virtual event last week, finding cells that can be optimized for manufacturing is time and resource intensive, in part because these cells often times need to be adapted for growth in a biomanufacturing environment. The good news is over time many of these cell lines, once identified and developed, can be reproduced indefinitely.

Growth Media

In order to for cell cultures to grow and reproduce, you need to feed them energy and nutrients. In the world of biomanufacturing, the fuel for cell-cultured meat reproduction is known as growth media. One of the biggest challenges in the early stage of cultured meat production is much of the early growth media was fetal bovine serum – or FBS – which is both misaligned with the purpose of cultured meat production and is widely seen as not economically viable.

However, the industry has been working hard to move away from FBS towards more humane and scalable alternatives. Mosa Meat made news last year with an 80x reduction in the cost of its FBS-free growth media, and this week Avant said it’s achieved a 90% cost reduction in the production of its cultured fish maw using non-FBS growth media. Other potential growth media in the future could be based on innovation such as that from Solar Foods, which is creating low-cost protein out of “thin air” using gas fermentation processes.

Biooptimization

The process of taking stem cells from animals and getting them to reproduce at a big enough scale to produce enough for human-level consumption is perhaps the biggest lift of all. According to Trippet, cultivated meat companies need to optimize their processes to produce at high-volume commercial scale production. This means a lengthy, multistage biooptimization process goes from high-throughput screening to identify optimal cell cultures for manufacturing, to lab-scale demonstration, pilot plant production and finally commercial scale production.

Much of this early work – cell line screening and benchscale demonstration and optimization – has already happened at some of the more mature cultured meat startups like BlueNalu, Mosa and Supermeat, and now these companies are moving onto pilot plant buildouts and production. These companies (and those that follow them) will utilize the learnings and processes developed during pilot production and they prepare for the move into commercial scale production.

Bigger and Better Bioreactors

A big part of this move into commercial scale production will be the transition to bigger and better bioreactors. The reality for today’s cultivated meat industry is that the currently available high-scale bioreactors for cellular agriculture were developed to produce high price-per-unit pharmaceuticals. However, since a cellag chicken burger at McDonalds will have a much lower price per unit than a vaccine, there’s a need to create better optimized high-volume bioreactors that can act as meat breweries.

The reason for optimization is pretty straightforward: replicating mammalian cells for food is immensely more difficult than replicating tissue for pharmaceuticals.

From the conclusion of Mark Post’s 2015 research paper at Maastricht University entitled “Alternatives for large-scale production of cultured beef: A review“:

Tissue engineering in large-scale is a difficult task and the scale of cell and tissue culture needed for food applications is orders of magnitude higher than for medical applications. Commercially available systems, microcarrier or cell-aggre- gate based are a good start but need to be optimized for bovine satellite cells, including but not limited to, specialized microcarriers.

Like we saw with the early days of the Internet, making the picks & shovels for the coming gold rush can be lucrative. That could mean riches for new entrants like Cellular Agriculture and for existing players like Thermofisher and Sartorius.

Interestingly, one of the industries that might move into this space is big brewing itself, as hinted at by Zoe Leavitt, an investment principal at ZX Ventures (the investment and innovation arm of brewing giant AB InBev), told The Spoon on last week’s Clubhouse live chat that the big brewing company has been evaluating how it could play in cultivated meat infrastructure.

Production of Complex Cuts

The types of cultivated meat that will likely reach price parity are unstructured meat, in other words products like ground beef. However, meat-eaters will want products like premium cuts of ribeye steak and filets of tuna to go with burgers, which means developing technology for structured cuts of meat.

One of the key technologies that will deliver structured cuts of meat is scaffolding. Scaffolding is that part of cultivated meat that allows the cells to adhere to and grow. Companies have been working to develop edible and biodegradable scaffolding technologies, including Matrix Meat which has created an edible scaffolding technology that they say will allow for a several millimeter thick cut of structured meat to grow.

Another key technology for structured meat production is 3D printing, which some companies like Aleph Farms has developed bioprinting technology to enable them to make complex cuts like ribeye. Other cultivated meat producers like BlueNalu are utilizing processing technologies like layering that have been optimized in the high-volume food production world.

Conclusion

These are no doubt exciting times for cultivated meat. Hundreds of millions of dollars of capital are pouring into the market, and the Good Food Institute has identified over 55 startups working in this space in Q1 2020 and some estimates have that at over 80 as of Q1 this year. Additionally, innovation visionaries like Bill Gates talk about converting nation states to cell-ag-based meat production in the future.

And while there is no doubt other hurdles outside of the technology and industrial optimization such as incumbent opposition and government regulations and policy frameworks that need to be considered, if progress continues on the pace we’ve seen over the past decade, I think a cultured meat value meal at my local fast food joint is not out of reach in few short years.