Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cell ag

Cultimate Foods Raises €700k To Develop Cultivated Fat for Hybrid Alt-Meat Products

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.

As Future Food Companies Look to Grow, A New Crop of Startups Lend a Hand on Biomanufacturing Scale-up

While companies creating precision fermented and cell-cultured food products continue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, the reality is their products are still years away from making a significant dent in the overall consumption of a growing global population.

The primary reason for this is that these products still aren’t being produced at nearly the scale they need to feed billions of people. Some estimates have put the biomanufacturing capacity needed by 2030 at 10 billion liters in order to meet the projected demand for fermentation-based animal proteins.

The good news is that a growing number of companies are building out technology and services platforms to help these companies move towards scaled production. One such company is Solar Biotech, which makes customized plant architectures to help future food and other companies scale up their biomanufacturing capacity. The company has been working with startups such as Motif Foodworks and TurtleTree Labs to help them develop their product and move towards higher capacity production.

With Motif, Solar helped them move into pilot production manufacturing for their new plant-based meat ingredient building block, HEMAMI. In partnerships like this, Solar will assist a company with technology transfer of their early products towards higher-scale manufacturing using what it calls its SynBio Hyperintegration Algorithms (SHAs). The end result of its proprietary algorithms is creating customized and modular production facilities built around what the company calls BioNodes.

The partnership worked so well for Motif in developing its HEMAMI product line that the company recently extended its collaboration with Solar.

“The continuation of our partnership will help secure the infrastructure needed to build out Motif’s pipeline of future products,” said Jonathan McIntyre, CEO of Motif FoodWorks, of his partnership with Solar. “Companies like Solar Biotech are an essential link in the move to create a more sustainable food-supply chain that has a positive impact on people, animals and the planet.”

Pow Bio is another company that brings scale-up expertise to new food startups. Pow helps startups building alternative proteins with the necessary fermentation capacity and infrastructure to help move their product concept off the bench and into production scale.

“We have a complete fermentation lab that scales and can take you from a flask you can hold in your hand to 1000L liters of fermentation capacity, which covers the entire ‘pilot’ stage of scale-up,” said cofounder Shannon Hall.

Pow helped alt-cheese startup New Culture take its early lab work and scale-up for pilot production. Before New Culture worked with Pow, their product cost roughly $100,000 to produce a kilogram of cheese. After working with Pow, the company’s product has dropped significantly and is approaching price parity with traditional cheese.

And then there’s Culture Biosciences, a startup that investor Dave Friedberg has described as an ‘AWS for bioreactors’. The company initially started with cloud-connected 250mL stirred tank bioreactors for fast-cycle bench development as a service, and in October of last year took on funding to expand and build out 5L and 250L bioreactors to help move from bench to pilot-scale production.

“Through Culture, we now have the option of a one-stop-shop for bench-scale testing and pilot-scale production,” said Ranjan Patnaik, CTO of alt-egg startup The EVERY Company. “We can develop a process with Culture and easily make a large batch of material. Other benefits include accelerating product pipeline development, data-driven, and lower-risk scaling, and saving them time and money required to build additional fermentation capacity.”

As innovators in the future food industry work on developing their products, these three companies look to play a pivotal role in helping them make the leap. But these three aren’t the only ones, and I expect to see more startups emerge to help fill the biomanufacturing commercialization gap for future food products as investors realize the future food industry doesn’t lack for good ideas, but what it does lack the scale-up and production capacity needed to feed billions of people by 2030.

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.

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.