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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cell-based meat

Singapore: Eat Just and foodpanda Partner for Cultured Meat Home Delivery

Alternative protein company Eat Just and delivery service foodpanda announced a partnership yesterday that will see the two companies offer the world’s first home delivery of cell-cultured meat.

The program kicks off on April 22 in Singapore, where Eat Just made the world’s first sale of cultured meat in December 2020 at restaurant 1880. For the new program, customers will be able to order dishes from 1880 featuring Eat Just’s GOOD Meat cultured chicken for home delivery via foodpanda.

Yesterday’s announcement is noteworthy because it marks the first time consumers will be able to eat cell-based meat from the comfort of their own homes. Up to now, cultured meat has only been available to consumers via exclusive taste-testings like those at Supermeat’s kitchen lab in Israel, where customers offer feedback on dishes instead of payment. 1880 remains the only restaurant in the world right now to have made an actual sale of cultured meat.

Wider acceptance of cultured meat are coming, though. Cultured protein is being heralded as a way to fight climate disaster, since it requires fewer resources (land, water) than traditional animal agriculture. And startups around the globe have received massive amounts of funding of late, including Eat Just, who recently raised $200 million. Other cultured meat startups raising funds include Future Meat, Mosa Meat and CellMEAT.

Before more sales (and deliveries) can happen, though, cultured meat needs to get regulatory approval from more governments, and ideally needs to reach price parity with animal based protein.

For those in Singapore inside 1880’s delivery radius, GOOD Meat dishes available include Chicken & Rice with coconut rice, pak choi, sweet chili, chrysanthemums, microgreens; Katsu Chicken Curry with jasmine rice, heritage carrots, micro shiso, edible flowers; Chicken Caesar Salad with kale, romaine, edible flowers, shaved radish, plant-based Caesar dressing.

GOOD Meat and foodpanda said they plan to collaborate with other restaurants in Singapore, too. Starting in mid-May, GOOD Meat selections from JW Marriott Singapore South Beach will be available.

Cell-Cultured Fish Startup Bluu Biosciences Raises €7 million

Bluu Biosciences, a startup making cell-based fish, has raised a €7 million (~$8.24M USD) round of funding. TechCrunch was first to report the news, writing that Manta Ray Ventures, Norrsken VC, Be8, CPT Capital and Lever VC all participated in the round.

The Berlin, Germany-based Bluu is working on creating cell-based versions of salmon, trout and carp. Though there are more companies tackling the creation of cell-based beef and chicken, there is an emerging wave (pardon the pun) of startups making cultured fish protein. Bluu is focused on salmon, trout and carp. Here in the U.S. BlueNalu is working on cell-based mahi-mahi and bluefin tuna. And in Asia, the Hong-Kong-based Avant Meats is developing fish maw and sea cucumber, while Singapore-based Shiok Meats is making cultured shellfish.

Funding for cell-based protein startups continues to be heavy. A recent report from the Good Food Institute found that cultured meat startups raised $360 million in 2020. Just this week, Eat Just, which makes cell-based chicken that is actually for sale in Singpaore, raised an additional $200 million.

While cell-based fish products aren’t for sale yet, they are getting closer to market. BlueNalu is building out its pilot production facility, which will make 200 – 500 pounds of commercial grade cultured fish. Shiok plans to have it shrimp commercially available by 2022. And Avant recently announced a 90 percent cost reduction in the production of its fish maw.

All of this funding and progress is helping narrow the availability window of cultured meat products with some experts predicting it will hit price parity with traditional animal protein in five years.

‘Premium’ Cultured Meat Company Orbillion Bio Joins Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 Class

Startup accelerator Y Combinator has made its first investment in a cultured meat company with the addition of Orbillion Bio to the Winter 2021 cohort. Prior to joining YC, Orbillion participated in both the Brinc accelerator and Big Idea Ventures NYC program.

Orbillion’s focus is on cultivating higher-end meat products such as elk, lamb, and Wagyu beef. To develop these products, the company runs multiple cell lines through bioreactors, screening the cells and isolating those best suited to commercial food scale production. Machine-learning software helps pick out the best tissue and media combinations with which to make meat analogues.

The company told TechCrunch this week that its first product will be a Wagyu beef product that will be more of a minced product than a whole cut of steak. Orbillion plans to get that product into the market in 2023, though in what capacity (e.g., a restaurant) the company did not say, nor did it elaborate on which market.

The goal is to eventually provide the kinds of craft meats one would purchase not from the grocery store but from a high-end butcher shop. 

The focus on high-end meats may allow Orbillion’s products to reach price parity with their traditional counterparts sooner than other cultured meat companies. The company also says it wants to bring the cost of its products down even further, so that they actually become more affordable than traditional high-end meats. That idea is in keeping with recent comments entrepreneur/investor Jim Mellon shared with The Spoon, that meat made via cellular agriculture will eventually become more affordable than traditionally farmed meat.

Nor is Orbillion the only company veering away from the usual chicken, pork, and beef staples and developing premium cultured meats. Vow, in Australia, develops cultured meat products from a library of cells that includes kangaroo, alpaca, and lamb, among others. The company raised $6 million at the beginning of 2021.

For its part, Orbillion aims to get a pilot plant up and running by the end of 2022, which the company says will take roughly $3.5 million.

Avant Meats Says it has Achieved 90 Percent Cost Reduction for Its Cultured Protein

Avant Meats announced today via an emailed press release, that it has achieved a 90 percent reduction in the cost of producing its cultured functional proteins. The Hong Kong-based company also announced that it has partnered with Chinese biopharmaceutical company QuaCell to bring the cost down even further.

Avant is best-known as the company using fish cells to create cultured fish maw and sea cucumbers, both of which are considered delicacies in Chinese cuisine. The company conducted the first tasting of its fish maw product back in November of 2019.

Avant said that it will combine its cell-cultivation technology with QuaCell’s 7,000 m2 ISO and GMP accredited facilities in China, which are equipped with bioreactors that can reach 2,000 liters to supply FDA-compliant customers globally.

Avant said that it has already achieved a 90 percent cost reduction in the production of its proteins using the company’s fetal bovine serum (FBS)-free cell culture media. With the QuaCell partnership, Avant said that that it will target and additional 75 percent cost reduction. It plans to do this by converting ingredients to food grade from pharma grade and by optimizing its formula for large-scale bioreactors. Avant also said that its partnership with QuaCell will reduce its capital expenditure and accelerate its ability to scale by at least 12 months.

Price parity with animal-based meat has been a priority for the cultured meat sector as the industry aims to bring products into the mainstream. But as new and established startups in the cultured meat space continue to innovate, the timeline for that parity continues to shrink. Future Meat brought the cost of its cell-based chicken down 1,000x over the last three years, with a quarter pound serving now costing $7.50. CellulaREvolution just raised $1.37 million for its bioreactor technology that can continuously produce cells in a serum-free environment in small footprint. And in a recent Spoon podcast, Jim Mellon, author of Moo’s Law: An Investor’s Guide to the New Agrarian Revolution, predicted that cell cultured meat will hit price parity in just five years and will eventually be cheaper to produce than both traditional animal meat and plant-based meat.

Deals like the one between Avant and QuaCell, which pair a startup’s innovation with an established manufacturer, should certainly help increase production of cell-based protein and bring the price down in the process.


Aleph Farms Partners with BRF to Bring Cultured Meat to Brazil

Israeli startup Aleph Farms and Brazilian meat and food company BRF S.A. announced today that they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to bring cultured meat to Brazil.

Under the agreement, Aleph and BRF will co-develop and produced cell-cultivated meat using Aleph’s BioFram technology platform. BRF will also distribute Aleph’s meat in Brazil.

This is the latest move in what has been a busy year already for Aleph. In January, the company announced that it was bringing its cultured meat to Japan via a similar Memo of Understanding with Mitsubishi. On the product side, last month, Aleph announced that it had made the first cultivated and 3D bioprinted ribeye steak.

The entire cultivated meat space has actually had an incredible start to 2021. In addition to Aleph, CellMEAT, Mirai Foods, Mosa Meat, and Future Meat, are just some of the companies that have raised funding for their approach to cell-based meat.

Despite all this activity, price remains a big hurdle for widespread adoption of cell-based meat. Creating and scaling cell-based meat is still an expensive proposition, though the price is coming down. In a Spoon podcast interview this week, Jim Mellon, author of the book Moo’s Law: An Investor’s Guide to the New Agrarian Revolution, said:

“At scale, and we’ve got a pretty good scientific advisory board, we think that it will be 2.5 milliliters [of stem cell material] from a cow will produce the equivalent of seven or eight cows worth of meat in 40 days. So if you can do this in 40 days, we think the input costs will be 2.5 to one. And that compares to as you all know, a cow twenty five to one, a chicken nine to one.”

How quickly cell-based meat reaches price parity with animal meat remains to be seen. Even if price parity is achieved, however, there are still regulatory issues around cultured meat that must be ironed out. But deals like the one between Aleph and BRF will help the cultured meat industry scale up and reach the mainstream.

CellMEAT Raised $4.5M in Pre-Series A Round of Funding for its Cultured Meat Tech

South Korean cultured meat startup CellMEAT raised a $4.5 million Pre-Series A round of funding at the end of last month (hat tip to Green Queen). The round was led by Korea-based NAU IB Capital, with participation from BNK Venture Capital, DT & Investment, Ryu Kyung PSG Asset Management, JNU Holdings, Yonsei Technology Holdings, and U.S.-based Knollwood Investment Advisory, as well as existing investors Strong Ventures, Primer Sazze Partners, and Primer.

Founded in 2019, CellMEAT’s cultured meat technology involves an original cell culturing medium that acts as an alternative to the controversial fetal bovine serum. The company said that this round of funding will go towards continued research and development to bring production costs down and accelerate scaling to mass production. CellMEAT has R&D center in the cities of Gwangju at the Cheonnam National University and Seoul at Ewha Womans University’s Mokdong Hospital.

We are only two months in to 2021, and already investment in cultured meat startups is downright frothy. CellulaREvolution raised $1.37 million, BlueNalu raised $60 million, New Age Meats added another $2 million to its coffers, Vow Foods raised $6 million, Mirai Foods raised $2.4 million, and Future Meat raised $26.75 million.

There are still a number of hurdles before cultured meat can go mainstream, however. Chief among them, the price to create cultured meat needs to come way down. Mosa Meats, which just closed an $85 million Series B round this week, famously made a $325,000 cultured meat burger back in 2013. The price for Mosa’s meats has dropped 80x since then, thanks in large part to the elimination of fetal bovine serum in its process.

Thankfully, as you can see, there are a number of startups, including CellMEAT that are working on that issue.

Mosa Meat Closes $85M Series B Round

Mosa Meat announced today it has raised $10 million in a third and final closing of its Series B round, bringing the round’s total to $85 million. Nutreco and Just Eat Takeaway.com CEO Jitse Groen participated in the third closing, while the entire B round was led by Blue Horizon Ventures.

The closing follows a $55 million fundraise in September 2020, which was also part of the Series B round. The company’s total funding to date is $96 million.

Netherlands-based Mosa Meat is credited with having created the world’s first lab-grown hamburger back in 2013 to the tune of $325,000 in production costs for that single burger. The company brought that number significantly down last year when it achieved an 80x reduction in the cost of their product’s growth medium, which is typically the most expensive part of the cell-based meat-making process. A big part of this reduced cost was removing the use of fetal bovine serum (FBS), the expensive and highly controversial growth medium from which many cell-based meat companies are now distancing themselves.

The funds from Mosa’s Series B round will go towards extending the company’s pilot production facility in Maastricht, Netherlands, as well as towards developing “an industrial-sized production line” and building out the Mosa Meat team.

 The end goal, of course, is to get its meat products to customers. No date has yet been announced for that. Currently, the company is working with European regulators to demonstrate the safety of cell-based meat and get regulatory approval.

Mosa’s Series B round is the latest development in what has already been a busy year in the world of cell-based meat investments. In February alone, Israel’s Future Meat raised $26.75 million, New Age Meats extended its seed round by $2 million, and Redefine meat closed a $29 million Series A round.  

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.

CellulaREvolution Raises £1M for its Continuous Cell Culture Technology

CellulaREvolution, a UK-based cell culturing startup, announced this week that it has raised a £1 million (~$1.37M USD) round of funding. Investors include CPT Capital, Stephan Schmidt, Orange Light Ventures, Northstar Ventures, North East Innovation Funds and the newly launched Northern Accelerator Seed Investment Fund (NASIF).

Founded in 2019, CellulaREvolution was spun off from Newcastle University. According to the company’s website, it is developing two main products that have applications in the creation of cell-cultured meat and in the therapeutics world:

  1. A synthetic peptide coating that allows for serum-free cell culturing. This, the company says will make it possible to eliminate animal-derived serum from the culturing process.
  2. A bioreactor that can continuously produce cells in a serum free environment in much smaller footprint. CellulaREvolution estimates that “1m2 of continuous cell production would require about 7000m2 when using traditional production processes. E.g. 1m2 versus a football pitch.”

Because of its technology, CellulaREvolution says that it can make cell-culturing more efficient and affordable. Getting the price of cell-cultured meat down is critical before it can get any mainstream acceptance.

Thankfully, there are a number of startups tackling the issue of cultured meat affordability. Just this week, Future Meat announced that it had raised $26.75 million and brought the price of its hybrid cell/plant-based chicken down to $7.50 per quarter pound to produce. And last month, Cultured Biosciences announced its cloud bioreactors have proven their capabilities of high-throughput mammalian cell cultures, which could help cultured meat startups achieve scale. Cell cultured meat startups Mirai and Vow have also raised funding this year.

The cultured meat space is downright frothy so far this year and it’s only February. Look for even more breakthroughs and funding news in the weeks to come.

Future Meat’s CEO on Price Parity, Cultured Chicken in the U.S. and Raising $26.75M

Future Meat Technologies announced today it has brought the production cost of its cultured chicken breast product to under $10. The company has also raised an additional $26.75 million in capital to scale up production and get its product into market in the next 12 to 18 months.

Reaching cost parity with traditional meat is a vital step in the process of bringing cultured meat to the wider public. Speaking via a video chat today, Future Meat CEO Rom Kshuk said that getting to price parity with traditional meat has been part of his company’s mission statement from the start. Future Meat, he said has been able to “decrease cost by 1,000 times over the last three years.” As of now, a quarter-pound serving of its cultured chicken breast costs just $7.50 to produce.

Future Meat differs from many alt-protein companies in that it uses a blend of cultured and plant-based ingredients for its products, rather than choosing one or the other, as most companies do. This, Kshuk explained, is something of a “low-hanging fruit” approach since companies can typically get to market faster with a blended product as opposed to developing one that is 100 percent cultured. Kshuk said that right now, Future Meat will “use the best of both worlds” where these two approaches are concerned, though that balance will skew more towards exclusively cultured meat products in future.

For plant-based proteins, the company uses a mixture of the leading products on the market (soy, pea, fungi). Plant-based protein tends to provide a better texture and nutritional profile to food items than cultured protein, which is one advantage to using the former. However, the plant-based approach comes up lacking in terms of what Kshuk calls “the sensory experience” of the meat: flavor, aroma, etc. Those are elements cultured meat is better able to provide, for now at least.

At the moment, Future Meat is focused on scaling up its production, planning its approach to market, and trying to get a team on the ground in the U.S. It plans to launch in the U.S. by 2022. Initially, that will likely happen through two channels: restaurants and direct-to-consumer sales. The latter could be an especially lucrative format, given the rise in D2C commerce brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The recent fundraise will bolster all of these efforts. The $26.75 million funding round is a convertible note with participation from new investors that include German dairy producer Müller Group, ADM Capital, and CPG Rich Products Corp. Existing investors Tyson Foods, Archer Daniels Midland, S2G Ventures, Manta Ray Investors, Emerald Technology Ventures, and Bits x Bites participated, too. 

Future meat expects its pilot facility to start production in the first half of 2021 and is also seeking regulatory approval in multiple territories. 

Culture Biosciences Announces High-Throughput Mammalian Cell Culture Capability for Cloud-Based Bioreactors

One of the big challenges in developing cell-cultured meat products is the sheer amount of lab time needed to develop and optimize the manufacturing process so cells can be produced at scale.

This optimization process can involve working to develop the right growth media, finding the optimal growth conditions for the cells, or evaluating ways to genetically modify cell lines for better reproduction.

Traditionally much of this cell culture process development takes place in-house using a benchtop stirred tank bioreactor. But a startup called Culture Biosciences wants to take this process off the hands of cell-meat makers and allow them to utilize Culture Biosciences’ cloud-based bioreactor systems.

To demonstrate its capabilities, Culture Biosciences recently announced its high-throughput mammalian cell-culture capabilities have been proven out using CHO (Chinese Hamster Ovar) cell cultures.

The news, announced via a white paper written by the company’s senior bioprocess engineer Michael McSunas, shows the results of the work they had done using CHO cells in the company’s 250 ML cloud bioreactor. According to the white paper, Culture Biosciences was able to grow the cell lines from a customer and show reproduceability alongside internally developed cultures, as well as the ability to scale-down results from a customers 1 L glass bioreactors.

In short, Culture showed that results produced on-site are consistent, can be reproduced and scaled using their connected bioreactor technology, all important proof points for the company’s “bioreactor-as-a-service” model for cell-based meat development.

In such a model, the customer sends in vials with cells and growth media and allows Culture to thaw them and perform the studies in their 250 ML connected bioreactors. The data is then uploaded to the cloud for the customer to analyze.

If this idea of moving away from a completely “roll-your-own” infrastructure model and pushing some of development process to a service-based cloud model sounds like a concept from the Internet technology world, you’re right. That’s because Culture Biosciences CEO Will Patrick, who previously worked at Google, wondered why the world of biosciences didn’t have the same type of toolsets and accessible infrastructure such as the cloud industry with AWS or semiconductor industry with manufacturing fabs like those from TSMC.

Patrick eventually decided to build some of these tools himself in the form of his cloud-based bioreactor, and now he hopes they can act as a platform for mammalian cell development.

“Culture can help optimize the manufacturing process,” Patrick told via email. “This is important because optimizing the manufacturing process such that production is cheaper is one of the biggest R&D challenges that face cell-based meat companies.” 

Vow Foods, Maker of Cell-Based Kangaroo and Other Meats, Raises $6M

Sydney, Australia-based company Vow Foods announced today that it has raised $6 million in seed funding to further develop alternative forms of meat — chicken, pork, and kangaroo among them. The round was led by Square Peg Capital, with participation from Tenacious Ventures and existing investors Blackbird Ventures and Grok Ventures, according to an email sent to The Spoon.

Investment in the cell-based meat sector has steadily increased over the last several months, though most of that funding has gone towards companies producing alt forms of the most common meats, including chicken, pork, beef, and bacon. 

Like other cell-based meat companies, Vow uses animal cells, rather than actual animals, to produce alternative meat products. In cultivators, it nourishes the animal cells, which then form fat, tissue, and muscle just as they would if they were growing inside the animal itself. 

Unlike others in the space, Vow hasn’t limited itself to just the basics when it comes to meat types. As of this writing, the company has a cell library of 11 different animals that includes more exotic fare such as alpaca, water buffalo, and the aforementioned kangaroo. 

The company did a taste testing of its kangaroo dumpling in 2019. More recently, it held a “culinary demonstration” event that showed off six of its cell-based meat products. The company will also soon open a “food design studio” and laboratory in Sydney to further develop its products. 

And while eating a lab-grown kangaroo might still seem like the stuff of fantasy for many, cell-based meat as a legitimate player in the food industry is very much a reality now. As mentioned above, investment dollars for cell-based meat increased in 2020, and new companies and approaches emerged steadily throughout the year. To cap it all off, cell-based meat got its first-ever regulatory stamp of approval in Singapore, thereby opening the gates of opportunity for others.

Parts of the world — the U.S. being one of them — will probably never see cell-based kangaroo on grocery store shelves. However, Vow’s fundraise this week highlights not just further growth for the cell-based meat sector, but also an interest in the kind of variety and versatility the whole industry needs to continue its march into the mainstream food system.