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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cell-based

We Talked to BlueNalu About Creating Fish Cell Lines From Scratch

Cellular aquaculture pioneer BlueNalu was born out of a contradiction. The company’s founders noted that while technological development around mammal cell products was booming, there was a relative dearth of knowledge about fish cell development. Yet the market opportunity for cell-cultured fish—with global demand for seafood on the rise and wild stocks increasingly vulnerable—looked big.

In attempting to do for fish cells what its peers were doing for cow cells, BlueNalu and other cell-cultured seafood companies faced a steep learning curve. Mammal-cell companies could take advantage of existing cell lines and a wealth of research from the pharmaceutical industry, but fish-cell companies would have to start almost from scratch, unlocking the unique conditions required to propagate and stabilize fish cells.

For BlueNalu, the mission was not only to develop a stable cell line for a single species of fish. “It was about having the correct methods to be able to reproducibly extract stem cells from a wide range of species,” Lauran Madden, the company’s Vice President of Research and Product Development, told The Spoon this week over Zoom.

So the company developed a proprietary technology platform that would allow it to create stable cell lines, with the flexibility to switch from one species to another. Madden says that achieving that reproducibility was a special challenge because cell growth conditions vary between species. “For example, mahi and tuna are not exactly the same, but they’re more similar to each other than they are to a cow,” she says.

To identify a group of focus species, BlueNalu used a decision matrix that factored in a variety of species attributes. The team looked at how scarce or vulnerable a species was, and how heavily it was imported. They also considered species that pose health concerns—like tuna, which contains mercury. And they looked for species that couldn’t be raised using conventional aquaculture.

The search for suitable donor fish also had to be carried out carefully. “We try to find trustworthy sources for species, where they’re legally bred or caught,” says Madden. “And we do extensive testing on the sample tissue to make sure that it’s free of contaminants.”

The team ultimately succeeded in creating cell lines for eight different species of fish, including bluefin tuna, mahi mahi, yellowtail, and snapper.

With its proprietary tech platform and species flexibility, BlueNalu aspires to become more than a manufacturer of a fixed line of cell-cultured seafood products. “Our approach is to become a global brand, a supply chain of seafood products,” company President and CEO Lou Cooperhouse told The Spoon this week in a Zoom interview. In theory, the company could use its platform to respond to a decline of a given fish species.

Having invested extensively in building new technology, the company is eyeing a range of intellectual property opportunities. But Cooperhouse doesn’t expect to see the cell-cultured seafood space become as competitive as the plant-based meats arena in the near future. The technological barrier that still exists for budding cell-cultured seafood companies means that there’s still strong competitive insulation in this industry niche.

“This is a challenging category that requires quite a bit of capital,” he says. “In making cell-cultured fish fillets, there’s really, in my opinion, no other way to do this but through our technology.”

BlueNalu’s investments in research and development may eventually find applications outside of the alternative protein industry: The team believes that some of its discoveries could help to power scientific research and support conservation efforts. For instance, the company’s technology could help researchers to understand fish species’ responses to environmental contaminants at the cellular level.

“There’s so much that is unknown about fish species and the ocean in general,” says Cooperhouse. “We’re all about preserving biodiversity and ecosystem erosion. So yes, there could be some licensing opportunities and other opportunities for our technology to have some real value outside of BlueNalu.”

With its species cell lines ready to grow, BlueNalu is preparing to launch its products in the U.S. and abroad. The company recently announced a new partnership with European frozen food company Nomad Foods, the latest in a series of international partnerships. Cooperhouse believes the company’s tech platform will support its mission of supplying scarce fish species worldwide without competing with local, conventional aquaculture businesses.

“We’re not just making healthier products that are sustainable,” he says. “Our products also support food security, they create jobs, they build factories. It really is a bit of a holy grail opportunity for us.”

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.

Memphis Meats Re-Brands as UPSIDE Foods, Announces Cultured Chicken as its First Product

Memphis Meats, one of the older cell-based protein startups, announced today that it has rebranded and is now UPSIDE Foods. Perhaps more important, the company also announced that its first consumer product, cultured chicken, will be available to customers this year… pending regulatory approval.

Founded in 2015, UPSIDE Foods cultivates animal protein without the need to raise animals. The company is working on cell-based versions of different kinds of meat, but said in today’s press announcement that it chose chicken as its first product because of its versatility in recipes and culinary applications, as well as its appeal across geographic regions.

To make its cell-basd meat at scale, UPSIDE has broken ground on a production facility in the San Francisco Bay Area. The full-stack facility will produce, package and ship cultured meat at what the company says is a larger capacity than any other cell-based meat company.

Back in 2019, UPSIDE told The Spoon that the company was holding off on establishing a concrete launch date for their cultivated meat until they could guarantee their product was tasty and scalable, and until regulatory frameworks were established. This last bit was echoed in today’s press release with the “pending regulatory approval” caveat. So far, Singapore is the only country that has approved the sale of cultured meat. There hasn’t been as much clarity here in the U.S., though execs at cultured meat startups are hopeful approvals will be granted in the next two years.

We are definitely entering into a new phase in the evolution of cultured meat. A number of cell-based startups around the world have received funding this year, including CellulaRevolution, CellMeat, Mirai Foods and New Age Meats. In addition to more funding, UPSIDE and other established cultured protein startups like BlueNalu and Avant Meats are opening up their own production facilities to scale up the manufacturing of their meat.

It’s also worth noting that UPSIDE’s chicken announcement comes during the same week that Future Meat said it has dropped the production price of its cell-based chicken by 50 percent. In an interview with Plant Based News, Future Meat CEO, Rom Kshuk said it now costs $4 to produce 110 grams of its chicken, and that price should drop to $2 over the next year and a half. Reaching price parity with conventional animal meat will be a key factor in the success of cultured meat.

Along with a new identity, UPSIDE also announced a new investor today. Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, has invested an undisclosed sum in UPSIDE.

UPSIDE’s new name and look also reflects the company moving into its own next phase as it advances beyond research and into commercial production. If you’re interested in seeing how it all began with the company, I recommend watching the documentary Meat the Future, which chronicles the rise of Memphis Meats from its very early days through much of its growth.

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Future Meat is cutting costs on mass production with an unlikely cellular approach

Founded in 2018, Future Meat stayed under the radar until last fall when their Series A funding round raised $14 million—including a sizable investment from Tyson Ventures. Now, just two years in, the Israeli start-up is expecting a major scale up in early 2021 and is optimistic about being among the first to gain FDA approval thanks to an uncommon cellular approach.

Commercial scale has been Future Meat’s priority from the start. “We know we can [culture meat]. The question is how much will it cost,” said Yaakov Nahmias, Future Meat Chief Scientific Officer told me in an interview earlier this month. “Do you really want to make a $25,000 steak?”

Key to its plan to ramp up biomass and cut costs, is a unique choice of starter cells. While most cultured meat start-ups rely on some form of stem or muscle cell, the basic building block of Future Meat’s products is the cell-type that makes up your connective tissue: fibroblasts.

“These are the cells that every time you get cut, they close that cut very fast,” according to Nahmias, who developed the fibroblast technology in his university lab.  

Stem cells are a popular candidate for cell culture because they can become any type of cell, but growing and maintaining them is very expensive, Nahimas said. “They’re what we call phenotypically unstable.” Meaning, stem cells don’t stay stem cells for long. In nature, they’re meant to be stem cells for a day or less before transforming into another cell type. To harness their potential or stabilize stem cells, many start-ups rely on gene editing, a method that Future Meat is avoiding. 

Fibroblasts, on the other hand, are phenotypically stable making them less volatile and easier to grow in mass quantities. And Future Meat has an extensive patent portfolio protecting the way they grow and direct these fibroblasts. They can accelerate a natural process called spontaneous immortalization where the cells DNA rearranges so that it can divide forever. And “by adding some food grade molecules” to the cellular medium they can pressure “the fibroblast to become fat cells or muscle cells,” Nahmias said.

Another key advantage of these connective tissue cells is that Future Meat can grow them in suspension, they don’t require surfaces to cling to. Many other mammalian cells, like muscle cells (myocytes), need something to hold on to, a sort of scaffolding, when cultured.  Culturing in suspension means no need for scaffolding and it significantly increases the biomass that can be cultivated in a single bioreactor. According to Kate Krueger, alternative protein consultant at Helikon Consulting, “Suspension cell culture has a lot of promise in reducing cost of manufacture.”

Today, Future Meat  bioreactor systems can reach yields of 33 percent, converting a third of their volume to mass every two weeks. “It’s possible to grow the mass of 100 chickens every two weeks in a bioreactor the size of a standard refrigerator,” Nahmias said. They’re also working on a hybrid product, a combination of plant protein and bioreactor-grown fat cells that they can produce at two tons per week. By the second quarter of next year they expect peak capacity to increase to half a ton every two weeks and for that to triple again by the end of 2021. 

For now Future Meat is all about getting to scale, market and a reasonable price point to validate their process and prove their tech. But the end-game for Future Meat is about developing a platform—think of it as the AWS of cultured meat. And the target customer isn’t just a new meat industry, it’s the old one. 

The idea is to integrate their technology into the existing supply chain. Even individual farmers looking to diversify could include a bioreactor as part of their operations, Nahmias said. But he expects involvement from meat and ingredient giants like Tyson and Cargill will be what finally catapults cultured meat into the mainstream. Future Meats’ game plan is to have the approved and affordable tech ready and waiting. “Because once it happens,” he said, “it’s going to move quickly.”

Barcelona’s Cubiq Foods Raises €5M to Produce Better-for-You Cultured Fat

Cubiq Foods, a Barcelona-based startup making cultured fats for food products, announced today that it had raised €5 million ($5.4 million) from Blue Horizon Ventures and Moira Capital Partners (h/t Tech.eu). This bumps the company’s total amount of funding up to €17 million ($18.4 million).

Founded in 2018, Cubiq Foods cultivates fats and fat/water emulsions for use in industrial food products. The process is very similar to what companies are doing with cultured meat, only they’re doing it with fat. Specifically, Cubiq Foods makes oils that are rich in omega-3s, which have a laundry list of health benefits.

With its new funding, Cubiq Foods will scale up the production of its fats to industrial levels. It aims to make its cell-based fats commercially available to companies around the world by the end of 2020.

In addition to its omega-3 fat, Cubiq also converts liquid oils — like olive oil — into solids, which are intended as replacements for vegan fats like coconut oil. This could have real benefits in plant-based meat, specifically. Many options on the market right now, like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, use coconut oil to give their ground “beef” a juicy richness. Coconut oil is high in saturated fat, which can raise cholesterol levels. Adding Cubiq Foods’ new fats to their products could help plant-based meat companies make their foods more healthy and better fight critiques around health they’ve struggled against over the past year.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, plant-based meat has been getting more attention than ever — and attracting a boatload of funding, to boot. In this climate, I doubt that Cubiq Foods will have difficulty finding alternative protein companies to partner up with.

Study: Consumers Willing to Pay 37 Percent More for Cultured Meat

A new study from Maastricht University (UM), where Dr. Mark Post created the world’s first cultured hamburger in 2013, suggests that consumers are willing to pay a premium for cell-based meat.

The study, published in PLOSONE this week, was based on a tasting that UM scientists held for 193 consumers in the Netherlands. It’s the first study on consumer reactions to cell-based meat that included a physical product to taste. The participants were first given a presentation on cultured meat, including the science behind its production and its environmental benefits. They were then given two samples of hamburger, one labeled ‘conventional’ and the other ‘cultured.” However, in reality both were traditional beef burgers.

Even though the samples were identical, all participants rated the flavor of the so-called ‘cultured’ hamburger higher than the ‘conventional’ one. Afterwards 58 percent of the tasters said they would be willing to pay extra — an average premium of 37 percent — for cultured meat.

The participants also noted that their main deciding factor to determine how much more they’d pay for cultured meat was information. The more they knew about the process behind cell-based meat production — and its global societal and environmental impact — the more they were willing to pay for it.

The study also delves a bit into the idea of disgust, which is often more dependent on cultural norms than actual taste (ex. Westerners won’t eat bugs, even though they’re super sustainable). Disgust is certainly one of the bigger challenges that cultured meat will face when it gets to market. Companies have to convince consumers to not only sample this newfangled product — meat grown from cells in bioreactors — but, at least initially, they’ll also have to pay more for it.

“The study shows… that consumers will eat cultured meat if they are served it,” Post noted in an email sent to The Spoon. Not only that, they might even be willing to fork over more money for it. That is, as long as they’re provided with enough information to understand what exactly cell-based meat is, and why it could be an appealing option.

Of course, when cultured meat does eventually hit the market — likely a few years from now in restaurants, a decade from now in supermarkets — companies won’t be able to sit down every consumer and give them a presentation on why it’s a good option for the planet. Instead, they’ll have to rely on marketing to get the word out. Maybe even rope in some high-profile celebrity and chef endorsers like Beyond Meat has done.

They’ll also likely have to face negative campaigns from Big Meat and its friends. The CCF, a lobbying agency with ties to meat corporations, has already aired harsh commercials tearing down plant-based meat. When cultured meat — which is actual animal tissue, just grown outside the animal — becomes available, you can bet that Big Meat will come out swinging. At that point, information (and misinformation) will become all the more important.

New Study Puts Cell-based Beef Grown on Soy Scaffolding to the Test

A study published today in the scientific journal Nature Food outlines a new way to give cell-based meat a realistic, well, meaty texture. In the study, which was authored by researchers from Israeli cultured meat company Aleph Farms and the Technion Institute of Technology, Israel, describe tests of a new 3D scaffold made of soy protein on which animal tissue can be grown. (Thanks for the tip, CNET.)

The scientists tested out the scaffold with bovine cells to create a sample that looked like beef muscle tissue. The scaffold is porous, which gives the animal cells space to latch on and grow their own interweaving matrix of tissue. It’s also edible and, since it’s made from soy, provides additional protein. Tasters in the study noted that the final product accurately mimicked the texture of beef and had a “meaty flavour.”

For those who don’t nerd out studying next-gen alternative protein, texture is one of the biggest hurdles facing consumer adoption of cell-based meat. Scientists may already be able to grow muscle and fat tissues, but putting them together in a way that emulates the texture of meat is a much trickier issue. That’s why most of the samples of cultured meat and seafood displayed during culinary demos thus far — shrimp dumplings from Shiok Meats, chicken nuggets from JUST, and beef burgers from Mosa Meat — have the texture of ground meat.

However, companies and scientists around the world are experimenting with new ways to grow animal tissue cells. Aleph Farms, whose researchers helped write the aforementioned study, has successfully grown cell-based steak, albeit in very thin cuts. Memphis Meats’ technology allows it to grow pretty realistic-looking cuts of cultured chicken. Atlast Foods uses mycelium (mushrooms roots) to create edible scaffolds on which to grow muscle cuts like beef. Researchers are also experimenting with materials like spinach, gelatin, and even LEGOs as cultured meat scaffolding material.

We’re still likely several years from tasting cell-based meat ourselves, no matter the texture. Before it can hit the U.S. market, cultured meat has to gain regulatory approval from both the FDA and the USDA — and we don’t know if the timeline might be slowed down by the current global pandemic. Looking on the bright side: maybe that equates to more time for researchers to continue to solve the cultured meat texture problem.

BlueNalu Nets $20M Series A to Accelerate Development of Cell-based Seafood

BlueNalu, the startup focused on creating seafood directly from fish cells, today announced that it had closed a $20 million in Series A funding. The round was co-led by Stray Dog Capital, CPT Capital, Clear Current Capital, and New Crop Capital. Combined with previous funding raised in 2018, this Series A brings BlueNalu’s war chest up to $24.5 million.

Based in San Diego, BlueNalu was founded two years ago to create a platform to grow a wide variety of seafood — fish, crustaceans, and more — from cell samples in large bioreactors. Since then, the company has been quite busy. Bluenalu hosted a culinary demo of its cell-based yellowtail back in December. A month later, they partnered with Nutreco, one of the world’s largest fish feed companies, to accelerate the scaling of its cultured seafood in order to bring it to market more quickly.

When is that exactly? The company has stated that they hope to start selling their cultured seafood products (maybe starting with yellowtail?) in two to three years. In five years they hope to break ground on their first large-scale production facility. That’s part of what they’ll use their new funding for, according to a press release emailed to The Spoon. BlueNalu will also channel its fresh funds into expanding its team and accelerating its product’s path to market.

With its significant Series A complete, BlueNalu is in an advantageous spot to become a leader in cell-based seafood production. Compared to its competitors, like Wild Type, Finless Foods, and Avant Meats, BlueNalu is working across multiple fronts — legislation, R&D, and supply chain — at a very quick pace. BlueNalu has also unveiled plans to build a 150,000 square foot facility which could produce 18 million pounds of their cell-based seafood per year. If that comes to fruition, it’ll be hard to compete with.

Then again, cellular aquaculture isn’t a zero-sum game. Cultured seafood (or meat, for that matter) isn’t even to market yet, so there are plenty of opportunities for multiple companies to debut their own cell-based fish, shrimp, and more. Plus many startups are focusing on a particular species, so there’s space for everyone to stake their claim.

A rep from BlueNalu told The Spoon that they think this is “the largest A round to be secured in the cell-based food industry.” (Memphis Meats secured a hefty $161 million last month, but that was a Series B.) Twenty mill is nothing to sniff at, but it’s a metaphorical drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of funding that BlueNalu will need to make their goal — scalable, sustainable, affordable cultured seafood — a reality.

Future Food: So… Lab-grown Breastmilk is a Thing Now

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Here is a sentence I never thought that I would type: It looks like lab-grown breastmilk might be a thing.

I first heard of this technology back in December when I interviewed the team behind TurtleTree Labs, a Singaporean startup that uses lactating mammary gland cells to produce milk. They can use the cells of any animal, but the company is starting with human breastmilk because a) it has a higher price point and thus can enter the market more quickly, and b) nobody else is doing it.

Then yesterday I spoke with BIOMILQ, a U.S.-based startup doing basically the same thing. However, while TurtleTree will eventually use its tech to develop a suite of milks, BIOMILQ is focused exclusively on developing human breastmilk.

It’s strange how quickly you get used to an idea. Back when I first heard about TurtleTree, I wrote a Future Food newsletter asking whether or not the world is ready to accept the idea of human breastmilk grown in a lab. (Conclusion: Maybe not yet, but soon.) Now that more companies are entering the space, I’m no longer questioning if people will accept this new technology, but when we’ll be able to put it to the test.

That’s why it’s so exciting to cover this space. Eating a “bleeding” plant-based burger sounds offputting, then Impossible Foods gets on the menu at Burger King. The idea of growing milk from genetically modified microbes starts out sounding far-fetched, then a few months later you’re eating ice cream made by Perfect Day.

Growing breastmilk in a lab might have a slightly longer adjustment period, but given the increasing interest in other cultured foods like meat and dairy, I really think it will become normalized. Provided these companies can actually scale and reach their pricing goals (admittedly, a big “if”), the technology could also have a massive potential in lower-income parts of the world without access to consistent infant nutrition.

Kind of makes you wonder what will become a “thing” next, huh?

Photo: Impossible Foods

Impossible Food claps back against Big Beef ad
If you’re one of those people who only watch the Super Bowl for the ads (guilty), you might have seen a very pointed spot attacking alternative meat. The next day Impossible Foods released a parody of that ad on YouTube.

You can see the full commercials here, but I’ll summarize and say that both featured spelling bees with cute kids having to spell words that are unappetizing ingredients — one found in meat alternatives, the other in beef. P’s and Q’s aside, it’s interesting (though not altogether surprising) these types of attack ads are happening at all. We’re used to seeing them around politicians, but meat? Not so much.

Clearly Big Beef and its friends are nervous about the growth of meat alternatives and are trying to throw money at the problem. Meat lobbying groups are already fighting plant-based meat in the courtroom over labeling restrictions, with Tofurky stepping up as leader of the resistance. It seems like Impossible is ready to do the same in the advertising field.

But fighting groups with funds hefty enough to pay for an ad during the Super Bowl ad will be a tough battle — alternative meat companies better come prepared for the fight.

Protein ’round the web

  • Canadian startup Noblegen has unveiled its first product: a plant-based “egg” that can work in scrambles as well as in baking (h/t FoodNavigator).
  • Purple Carrot, the plant-based meal kit company, is now including products from meatless meat brands Lightlife and Field Roast in its pre-prepped kits.
  • Ripple is launching a line of ice creams made with its signature pea protein-derived Ripptein (via Vegnews).
  • Israeli cultured meat company Aleph Farms is launching an educational center to educate consumers on cell-based meat.

Not sure what to get your S.O. for Valentine’s? How about some plant-based bacon? Prime Roots will be doing a one-day presale of its fungi-based “bacon” on February 14 — you can pick some up here while supplies last.

Eat well,
Catherine

Memphis Meats Raises $161M, Doubling Global Investment in Cultured Meat

Today Memphis Meats, a Berkeley, CA-based startup making cell-based meat, announced it has closed a $161 million Series B funding round. The round was led by SoftBank Group, Norwest and Temasek, with participation from big names like Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Kimbal Musk, Cargill, Vulcan Capital, Fifty Years, and more. In total, Memphis Meats has raised just over $180 million.

Talk about some serious moneys. According to an email from the Good Food Institute, this massive raise more than doubles the total amount invested in cultured meat globally (up until now, all companies combined had only raised $155 million).

With its fresh capital, Memphis Meats plans to build a pilot production facility and continue to push towards launching its first cell-based product.

As to when that will be . . . we don’t exactly know. Despite having the most funding of any cultured meat company, Memphis Meats still has yet to announce when it expects to launch its first product — or even what that product will be.

When I asked David Kay, Memphis Meats’ Senior Communications Manager, at SKS 2019 back in October, he said that there are two reasons they’re holding back on a concrete launch date. First, they want to wait until they can guarantee that their product is both tasty and scalable, so as not to scare off any curious consumers. Second — and perhaps more importantly — they’re going to wait until regulatory frameworks for cultured meat are solidly established.

According to multiple experts I’ve spoken to in the cell ag field, regulatory hurdles are the main reason that cell-based meat and seafood has not already gone to market (and one of the reasons it might first be sold in Asia). As the first cellular agriculture company in the U.S., Memphis Meats is operating with an abundance of caution so as not to derail the regulatory approval process. In fact, the startup is one of the founders of a new coalition to speed up cell-based meats’ path to market.

It may not have announced plans about when it’ll bring its meat to market, but Memphis is clearly already planning for a future where it’ll make massive amounts of product. The company joins BlueNalu and Israel-based Future Meat Technologies, both of whom have also announced plans to build large facilities to produce massive quantities of cell-based meat and seafood.

With $161 million more in its pocket, that future is looking a lot closer for Memphis Meats.

BlueNalu Partners with Nutreco to Advance Cell-based Fish ‘Feed’

BlueNalu, a cellular aquaculture company growing seafood in the lab, announced a partnership with Nutreco, one of the world’s largest fish feed companies, late last week.

Speaking with BlueNalu CEO Lou Cooperhouse at the time, he told me that working with Nutreco will help BlueNalu commercialize its cell-based seafood in two ways. First, BlueNalu can tap into Nutreco’s extensive knowledge of fish feed so that BlueNalu can optimize its media: the nutrient-dense “food” in which cell cultures are grown.

Though Nutreco currently focuses on feeding live fish, Cooperhouse said that their solution has very similar components to what BlueNalu uses to grow its fish cells in a lab. In fact, he claims that making food for cell cultures is even simpler. “If you’re feeding a living fish, they need certain ingredients to maintain skin, brain, etc,” he said. “But we’re only trying to feed cells that we need.” Think: muscle and fat cells. 

Once BlueNalu brings its cell-based fish to market — which he hopes will be within two years — Cooperhouse said that Nutreco could also serve as a supply chain partner for media ingredients. BlueNalu will need a lot of feed; in five years, the startup plans build a massive facility that will produce a whopping 18 million pounds of cell-baased seafood per year.

Media (or cell food) is typically one of the most significant hurdles for cell-based meat and seafood companies. Extracting cells from an animal is cheap; it’s growing them to a significant number in a short time frame that’s the real challenge. Currently media is quite costly, which is why cell-based meat is so costly (it’s typically at least 10x more expensive than animal meat).

Other companies are trying to solve the cell culture feed issue. Canadian startup Future Fields is developing an animal-free media to sell to cellular agriculture companies; in Japan, Integriculture is developing its own B2B feed solution. Some cellular ag companies, like JUST, are developing their own plant-based media internally.

The partnership with Nutreco could give BlueNalu a leg up over other cultured seafood companies. Nutreco’s expertise and existing supply chain could help the cell-based fish startup develop more efficient growth media, and scale it more quickly when the time comes.

But the partnership isn’t just beneficial for BlueNalu. It will also give Nutreco an “in” to the cell-based meat space, where it will join other large ingredient suppliers like Merck and Cargill. Talk about a big fish in a small pond.

New Age Meats, the First Company to Debut Cell-based Pork Sausage, Raises $2.7M

Yesterday New Age Meats, a cellular agriculture developing cultured meat, announced it had closed $2.7 million in seed funding. The round was led by ff Venture Capital and other investors include Agronomics Ltd, Sand Hill Angels, Supernode Ventures, Hemisphere Ventures, Kairos Ventures and SOSV, which previously invested in the company during New Age Meats’ time at the IndieBio accelerator program.

For now, the Berkeley-California-based company is focusing on cell-based pork. They’ve already made significant strides — New Age Meats did the first ever taste test of cell-based pork back in 2018 to positive reviews. They hope to bring a cultured meat product — probably pork — to market within the next couple of years.

According to CEO Brian Spears, who I spoke to earlier that year, their startup’s edge comes from harnessing automation and data science to optimize bioreactors — in short, to grow more meat more quickly. Prior to founding New Age Meats Spears, who has a background in engineering had started a research automation company. He claims that by harnessing automation they can dramatically speed up not only research for cultured meat, but can also press fast-forward on manufacturing. 

Not surprisingly, according to a press release New Age Meats will channel its seed round into investments in automation equipment and growing its team.

Over the past few months there’s been a lot of money funneled into cultured meat and seafood startups: Wild Type, Future Meat, Shiok Meats, and Meatable have all announced new funds over the past six months. And just today Mosa Meats, the company which debuted the first ever cultured hamburger back in 2013, announced it had formed new strategic partnerships to accelerate its launch date.

With so much new capital, it seems like the race to bring cell-based meat to market is heating up (despite the fact that there are still significant regulatory hurdles). TBD if New Age Meats’ focus on automation can help it win that race, but this new funding certainly won’t hurt.