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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cell-based meat

Michelin Star Japanese Chef Launches Startup to Create Cultured Meat

While high-end cuisine is a logical launch point for cultured meat, few expect chefs themselves to start companies that create this form of alternative protein.

But if you’re Chef Shimamura Masaharu of Japan, someone who writes that in high school he wondered whether to “to wear a cook’s lab coat or a scientist’s lab coat,” straddling the two worlds makes perfect sense.

Which is why the chef/owner of Michelin-starred restaurant Unkaku has launched DiverseFarm, a joint venture with cell-ag technology company TissueByNet.

TissueByNet has developed a proprietary technology to make cultured cellular tissue to create lab-grown organs in hospitals, which DiverseFarm hopes to now use to make cultured meat.

TissueByNet’s technology uses what is called spheroids, which are three dimensional spherical globs of cells that get fed into what the company calls Net Molds. Net Molds are containers that allow the tissue to grow without a more traditional scaffolding structure based on biomaterials. The cell culture is placed into the Net Mold with the spheroids culture, where they fuse together and are ready to “harvest” in one to three weeks.

On its website, DiverseFarm shows some examples of what the cell-cultured meat menu selections might look like, listing a variety of mainly cultured duck meat including “Deep-fried Domyoji of cultured duck meat, seasonal bean paste” and “Dashi chazuke of cultured duck meat.”

The news is another illustration of the growing interest in cultured meat in Japan. While Singapore’s been getting lots of attention due to the government’s active catalyzation efforts and milestones like Eat Just’s, startups like Integriculture and Shojinmeat (the news of DiverseFarm was first highlighted via a tweet from Shojinmeat) have captured the imagination of those in this island nation who are interested in increasing food sovereignty.

Eat Just Makes the World’s First Sale of Cultured Meat

A couple short weeks after getting regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore, Eat Just announced last night it has made the first commercial sale of its GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken. 1880, a private restaurant/club and social impact organization in Singapore, will debut the product this Saturday, Dec. 19, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

The GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken product will make its debut in three different dishes, each inspired by a different country: Brazil, China, and the United States. The first diners to taste the dishes will be young people, ages 14 to 18, who “have shown, through their consistent actions, a commitment to building a better planet.”  

The sale to 1880 is not only a first for Eat Just, it’s a first for the cell-based meat industry, which has seen plenty of successful lab prototypes but few opportunities for the public to actually taste the products. Up to now, the latter has been in the form of taste-testing events.

Getting regulatory approval to actually sell cultured meat products advances the entire industry. After all, you can have the tastiest, most environmentally friendly cut of slaughter-free meat out there, but without regulatory approval to sell and distribute it, the product won’t make much of an impact on our global food system. We may be years away from finding a cell-based burger or chicken sandwich in the majority of restaurants around the world, but Eat Just’s news is another significant step in that direction. 

Singapore is a logical place to start. The city-state has been at the forefront of much food tech innovation over the last year, with the Singapore government pouring millions of dollars into its 30×30 initiative aimed at increasing local food production. And since the bulk of Singapore’s meat is currently imported, there’s no “Big Meat” producers and lobbyists pushing back on alt protein the way there is in the U.S.

All that said, I also have an eye on Israel as another important location for the advancement of cultured meat. That country is home to a number of cell-based meat companies, with SuperMeat even opening its own test-kitchen-meets-restaurant initiative in Tel Aviv where guests apply to visit the restaurant and taste the food in exchange for detailed feedback. (Dishes on the menu are not yet for sale.) Additionally, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, recently tasted cell-based meat and wants to establish a national policy for alternative protein.

Eat Just has not yet mentioned locations beyond Singapore where the company will sell its GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken. But given the above, Israel would be an obvious next country for the company to expand both the regulatory approval and sale of its cultured meat products. In the meantime, GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken will be available to 1880 customers over the coming weeks and months.  

Eat Just Gets the World’s First Regulatory Approval to Sell Cultured Meat

In a first for cultured meat, Eat Just has received regulatory approval to sell its cell-based chicken product. The company, best known at this point for its plant-based egg products, announced last night that its cultured chicken product has been approved for sale in Singapore as an ingredient in chicken bites. Other cultured chicken products are planned for the future.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, this approval deems Eat Just’s cell-based chicken as “safe for human consumption.” To achieve this, and to the demonstrate safety and quality of its end product, the company spent months documenting its proprietary process for making cell-based chicken. An analysis included information on the identity and purity of the chicken cells, the full manufacturing process, as well as the nutritional components of the end product. 

Eat Just worked with the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), Singapore’s regulatory authority for food safety. The company said it has also struck deals with “well-established local manufacturers” to finish the product before it goes out to restaurants.

Heading into restaurants first is in keeping with Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick’s timeline for cell-based meat, which he outlined for us at this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit. Cell-based meat companies don’t simply jump from a successful prototype in the lab to mass commercialization. Rather, there are a number of stops along the way, the first of which is to get the prototype out of the lab and into a place like a restaurant. However, the journey for cell-based meats as they evolve from prototype stage will be lengthy: Tetrick put the timeline “somewhere north of 15 years” for when the buying public will find cell-based meats as ubiquitous as, say Coca-Cola products.

Getting regulatory approval is paramount to commercializing cell-based meat, so today’s news marks a significant milestone not only for Eat Just but for the entire cell-based meat sector, which has seen an astounding amount of investment over the last several months. 

Commenting on Eat Just’s milestone, Good Food Institute Executive Director Bruce Friedrich said, “Cultivated meat will mark an enormous advance in our efforts to create a food supply that is safe, secure, and sustainable, and Singapore is leading the way on this transition.”

The regulatory approval will allow Eat Just to launch its forthcoming GOOD Meat brand in Singapore, the details of which are forthcoming at a later date.

Human Steak: the Next Lab-Grown Meat?

The range of alternative meats grown in a lab widens every month, and now we have companies attempting lab-grown beef, chicken, seafood, brisket, and even kangaroo. Could human meat be next?

I doubt it, but a group of designers recently highlighted how possible that concept would be should someone attempt to try it. Andrew Pelling, Orkan Telhan and Grace Knight made a DIY meal kit for lab-grown human meat that was recently nominated for Design of the Year by The Design Museum in London.

Called the Ouroboros Steak (named after the ancient symbol of the snake eating its own tail), the design is for a meal kit that would come with everything a person needs to culture cells from their own body and turn them into mini steaks. The design was commissioned for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Designs for Different Futures exhibition, which ended in March of this year. 

To be clear: no one is growing human meat to sell in the grocery stores. The design is purely conceptual. According to Design Museum, it is “a critical commentary on the lab-grown meat industry and critiques the industry’s claims to sustainability.”

That critique is right on the mark, since lab-grown meat producers generally rely on the controversial Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS) to produce their alt-meat wares. FBS is a byproduct that comes from the blood of cow fetuses. As this article from Slate from a few years back highlights, it’s a gruesome practice that involves killing a pregnant cow, removing the live fetus, then draining the latter of blood that eventually gets refined and turned into FBS. 

The website for the Ouroboros Steak concept doesn’t specifically mention FBS, but notes, almost wryly, that, “Growing yourself ensures that you and your loved ones always know the origin of your food, how it has been raised and that its cells were acquired ethically and consensually.”

To be fair, a number of lab-grown meat companies acknowledge the ethics around FBS, and some are taking steps to find a different media for their products. When I spoke with BioBQ last month, CEO Katie Kam emphasized that her company does not use FBS and is instead looking for an alternative media for its lab-grown brisket. In Canada, a company called Future Fields is in the midst of developing what it calls “animal-free media,” which is just as it sounds.

Still, the FBS is the go-to media when it comes to cell-based meat, and calling out the ethics of it was a major goal of the Ouroboros Steak design: “As the lab-grown meat industry is developing rapidly, it is important to develop designs that expose some of its underlying constraints in order to see beyond the hype,” Pelling told Dezeen magazine.

He added that, “We are not promoting ‘eating ourselves’ as a realistic solution that will fix humans’ protein needs. We rather ask a question: what would be the sacrifices we need to make to be able to keep consuming meat at the pace that we are?”

Lab-grown meat is in the midst of an investment frenzy, not to mention the subject of much hype and news coverage. But it won’t be landing on grocery store shelves any time soon, in part because, in addition to being controversial, FBS is extremely expensive. A number of regulatory issues and questions around scalability also need to be resolved before we’re eating a cell-based Big Mac or nabbing a couple fillets for the backyard BBQ. Opinions differ around lab-grown meat’s timeline to the mainstream, with some claiming it will take just a couple years and others putting that mark “somewhere north of 15.” Some say it will never happen.

Wherever the reality falls, lab-grown meat producers will have to address the controversies surrounding their process process. That could mean explaining to consumers the gory details of FBS or, better yet, finding an alternative. Human meat won’t ever be that alternative, but the Ouroboros Steak project rightly reminds us we need to think twice about the ethics of innovation before barelling headlong into the hype.

Shiok Meats Unveils Prototype for Cell-Based Lobster

At a recent exclusive tasting event, Singapore-based Shiok Meats unveiled a prototype for cell-based lobster, according to FoodNavigator-Asia, who attended the event. The prototype was unveiled at the event as part of two dishes, a lobster gazpacho and lobster terrine.

Shiok said the lobster is cultivated with the same technology the company uses it make its cell-based shrimp. Shiok takes a sample of lobster cells, which are then grown in a bioreactor and harvested several weeks later. Right now, it takes between four and six weeks for Shiok to produce its cell-based shrimp; the company says the lobster takes a couple weeks longer than that. It is also more expensive to produce, though the company is looking to bring the cost down to $50/kg at some point in the future.

Neither the shrimp nor the lobster are available for sale to consumers right now. The company plans to have its Shiok Shrimp product commercially available by 2022. A manufacturing plant in Singapore is slated to be operational at that time, too. Shiok raised a $12.6 million Series A round in September of this year, part of which will go towards building out the production facility. FoodNavigator reported that once that plant is up and running, Shiok will be able to get regulatory approval to sell its products, which it will initially do in restaurants and other B2B settings.

No cell-based meat or seafood is currently available for commercial sale, though plenty of companies are moving towards that future. The list includes BlueNalu, a company that also makes cell-based seafoods and is currently expanding its production facility, which the company plans to open in the next five years. And plenty of investment is currently happening in the cell-based meat sector, with Mosa Meat, Integriculture, Meat-Tech 3D, and others all raising funding in the last six months.

However, being able to sell these products to mainstream consumers and at scale will be a much longer process, one that could take up to 15 years, by some accounts. Costs must first come down, and companies must get regulatory approval before they can even sell their products to restaurants.

For its part, Shiok will keep innovating on various cell-based seafoods in the meantime. In addition to shrimp and lobster, the company plans to introduce a cell-based carp prototype in a few months. 

SuperMeat Has Its Own Restaurant Dedicated to Cell-Based Chicken

Restaurants are often an important stop for cell-based protein companies on the road to progress and eventual ubiquitousness, since they’re an obvious testing ground for prototypes. But as Fast Company pointed out today, Israel-based alt-protein company SuperMeat took that idea a step further and opened an entire restaurant dedicated to testing cell-based chicken products. 

Appropriately, the restaurant is just called The Chicken. Its website describes the establishment as “an innovative, sustainable restaurant experience” and “the world’s first test kitchen serving a menu of dishes developed from cultured chicken grown directly from chicken cells, all under the same roof.”

SuperMeat has been developing its lab-grown chicken since 2015, when the company began. Like other companies creating cell-based meat, SuperMeat takes cells from the animal — the chicken, in this case — and grows them in what it calls a “meat fermenter” (aka a bioreactor) to become the muscle, fat, and other tissues that make up meat. Once harvested, the meat can be prepared like the real thing.

Hence the restaurant, which is located in Tel Aviv. The menu is chicken-centric, with its signature dish being a cultured chicken burger. Ido Savir, SuperMeat’s CEO, told Fast Company that “Feedback from multiple tasting panels was consistent that it was indistinguishable from conventionally manufactured chicken, and simply a great-tasting chicken burger.”   

That feedback from consumers is important in the evolution of a cell-based meat product. To that end, The Chicken does not charge customers for meals. Instead, they are asked to provide feedback on the dishes. Presumably, a person has to have at least some interest and excitement around plant-based meat, since prospective diners must fill out an application that asks the reason for the visit. 

Getting the general public involved in the testing process for lab-grown meat is an important part of gaging how the average person might react to the taste, texture, smell, and look of these products. Along those lines, public tastings abound these days, including Mission Barns’ recent curbside taste test for its “bacon” and Eat Just’s culinary studio the company opened in Shanghai, China. For the extra-adventurous, there’s always kangaroo, which Australian company Vow showed off at a recent “culinary demonstration.”

Dedicated restaurants might be the next step for these companies, and SuperMeat may be opening more than one in the future. On The Chicken’s website, the company notes that the Tel Aviv location is its “first test kitchen,” which suggests more versions of this concept are on the way. 

Lab-Grown Meat is Scaling Like the Internet

This guest post originally appeared on Medium, and has been reprinted here with permission.

It’s easy to think that there’s hype in lab-grown meat. Just another Silicon Valley utopian tech. The idea of growing meat without animals is everywhere and very distant at the same time. Now a global trend, 80 startups work on lab-grown meat worldwide in one way or another… Four years ago there were two. Consumer interest is also evolving rapidly — the #plantbased market is growing quickly, soon it will be 10% of the meat market. Lab-grown meat has been thoroughly covered in the news, on magazine covers and in books.

Let’s take a look at decoding some questions from the news and announcements. As novelty or mainstream product, when will this meat come to market? Will it ever reach its promise of selling as cheaply as other meat in the deli case?

Look at the forces driving Cellular Agriculture (cellAg) and we will see that lab-grown meat will be a part of everyday life in a surprisingly short time.

Last fall I plotted some of the lab-grown meat stories onto a pricing plot since the dawn of time (2013):

The red dots are pricing statements and estimates for a serving of lab-grown meat through last summer. The slope shows a price drop that is faster than some of the most powerful technologies that we have seen.

The blue line is the famed Moore’s Law , the cost of a transistor over a period of 12 years, — the classic impactful technology. Moore’s Law unleashed infoTech and the internet, e-commerce, facial recognition, smart phones, Amazon, Netflix, targeted advertising, the efficient and global dissemination of cat pictures.

The Green line is the cost of sequencing a human genome over the same period of time, compiled by the National Institutes of Health. The first human genome sequence was perhaps $300M. Last year I bought my own 20x covered genome sequence for $800 (it was on holiday special). Billions are being spent on mobilizing sequencing for personal healthcare, monitoring the environment, testing food safety and detecting COVID-19. Although not a consumer product by and large, sequencing is so cheap as to be just under the surface of our daily lives.

This curve is why Memphis Meats was an easy investment for me four years ago and why investors often jump in since. There is sixty-five years of cell culture research by a few million researchers worldwide as well as a global network of manufacturing experience all ready to jump in. Cell Science has spring loaded lab-grown meat. Overall, most biotech products have economics that start slow for each product but drop by log pricing over time. This is a fundamental upon which analysts at McKinsey have dubbed The Bio Revolution.

The slope of the pricing curve is steeper than transistors: cost has dropped 6000 times since Mark Post’s burger reveal 7 years ago. The red line fitting lab-grown meat cost crosses the $50/serving mark in 2021. This curve is not scientific and each company has its own internal pricing curve; the cost may already have dropped below $50/serving in some companies.

This year, just on time, a flurry announcements of product releases have come out. The biggest fans will be able to go out and buy lab-grown meat:

This first round of product releases wont be replacing the deli cut chicken breast and hot dogs in your grocery. Impossible Burgers were made with a simpler process but the first release in a few restaurants and were said to cost the company $100 a patty. These product releases will not be profitable, but today a pound pack of Impossible Burger costs $9.99 at Safeway. At the current rate of innovation, the next future of meat could be here in the next few years.

The Impossible Burger has had a cost drop of several hundred fold at least since its prototype days.

Moore’s Law is not a law. Each step along the curve will require new insights and new discovery. Like Moore’s Law, the “Shigeta’s Law” price of lab-grown meat will hit a physical law — how fast or how many times a cell can divide — how small a space can they grow in? How quickly can manufacturing and infrastructure be built out? How pure does the sugar in the media have to be to grow the cells? We aren’t there yet and the next innovations will be about manufacturing at very high scale and some of the unplumbed depths of cell biology.

To date, a lot of the drop has been in reagents and simple scaling tech. Today most meat is grown without Fetal Bovine Serum, but still relies on growth factors which are isolated from fermentation. Mosa Meats recently announced drastically lowering the cost of FBS free media. Other efforts around the globe will have to pursue scaling manufacturing and processing the cells.

And what about the hype? Not all of these companies will be around to see the public take their first bite of cellAg Burger. The Clean Meat startup explosion is a lot like the emergence of car companies. In 1900 the first American combustion engine automobile companies appeared. By 1910 the count had exploded to 266. Most of the companies were merged or died off until 3 companies dominated the market by the 1960s.

There was little first mover advantage: Ford was an early entrant (1903), General Motors (1908), and Chrysler was decades past the startup peak. (1928).

So yes there is hype — the same sort of hype that the automobile created. Small companies claiming too much and flaming out. But make no mistake, Animal Free, lab-grown, Cultured Meat is coming sooner than you think.

Aleph Farms’ “Aleph Zero” Program Aims to Grow Cell-Based Steaks in Space

Aleph Farms, announced its new “Aleph Zero” program today, which aims to bring the production of cell-based meat into outer space to help humans become “multiplanetary.”

Aleph’s lab-grown, slaughter-free approach to creating meat could mean that astronauts may one day could create their own steaks and other protein on long-haul missions far away from any natural resources.

Based on the press release, there isn’t a lot of, err, meat on the bones of this announcement. The company just says that it “is securing strategic partnerships with technology companies and space agencies for long term collaborative research and development contracts” to integrate Aleph Farms’ technology into space programs.

It should be noted, however, that Aleph’s meat has already been to space. Last year the company successfully grew small-scale muscle tissue aboard the International Space Station.

For something that is literally a giant vacuum, space is getting increasingly crowded with food tech. NASA is researching how to grow chile peppers in space, we learned in March that romaine lettuce grown in space was safe to eat, the Zero G oven lets astronauts bake cookies in space, and last year a Japanese consortium launched its Space Food X initiative to feed people in space.

Working on feeding people in space may seem less pressing than feeding those in need here on Earth. But as Aleph points out in its release, if food can be created in micro-gravity and far away from natural resources up in space, those innovations can help us feed people living in extreme conditions here on Earth.

SKS 2020: Why Singapore Is Fast-Becoming Food Tech’s New Superpower

That Singapore is a fast-rising superpower in food tech is something that’s become apparent over the last several months. And yesterday, during a SKS 2020 panel on the Asian food tech landscape, the city-state came up in conversation again as an enormously important location to watch when it comes to food innovation and investment.

“If I had to place my bet I would place it on Singapore,” said Michal Klar, an angel investor who also writes the Future Food Now newsletter. Joining him on the panel were Winnie Leung of Bits x Bites and Spoon Publisher Mike Wolf, and together, the group unpacked some of the reasons why so much food tech innovation is coming out of Singapore right now.

Arguably the biggest driver is that, at the moment, Singapore imports 90 percent of its food. That’s a precarious position to be in during the best of times, never mind during a pandemic that’s disrupted the global food supply chain. In response, the Singapore government launched a $21 million grant fund this year as part of its 30×30 initiative, which aims to have 30 percent of Singapore’s food produced locally by 2030. 

At the same time, that reliance on imports for the majority of its foods may actually help Singapore innovate on food tech faster for the short term. Since so much of the city-state’s food comes from outside its own borders, Singapore lacks some of the constraints other countries face when it comes to getting pushback by established players.

Alternative protein is a good example. Here in the U.S., both plant- and cell-based meat companies must go toe-to-toe with Big Meat producers and lobbyists over labeling of their products, shelf placement, and other issues. By contrast, Klar suggested that because Singapore’s meat supply is imported there’s nobody to push back on new developments and regulations happening in the city-state around alternative forms of meat. That, Klar reasoned, is one of the reasons Singapore is home to Asia’s best-funded cell-base meat startup, Shiok Meats, as well as a number of other up and coming players.  

Indoor agriculture/vertical farming is another area that could potentially thrive because of a lack of existing incumbents. Last year, local farms produced just 14 percent of leafy vegetables consumed by Singaporeans, so there’s little in the way of traditional agriculture to disrupt. At SKS, Leung noted that Singapore’s “highly urbanized” environment makes it an ideal setting for high-tech innovations in indoor farming. We’ve seen this in recent months with companies like SinGrow, which is growing a proprietary breed of strawberries in its vertical farm, and ag tech accelerators like GROW. Leung also flagged aquaculture as a sector to watch in Singapore.

Both Klar and Leung also pointed to Singapore’s regulatory environment as a reason for the city-states speedy growth in food tech innovation. There is only one agency in Singapore that regulates foods, said Klar. In other words, when companies prepare for the phase in which they must get government approval for their products, there’s no doubt or confusion as to who they must go to. This could speed up the process of regulatory approval, which in turn would mean a faster time to market for many companies. 

The above factors are just a smattering of reasons for Singapore food tech’s continued growth, and over the next several months we will continue to see new advances in ag tech, alt protein, packaging, and other areas of the food supply chain emerge.

Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick on the 4 Phases of Bringing Cell-Based Meat to the Masses

When will cell-based meat be available to the masses?

It depends on who you ask. At one SKS 2020 panel this week, participants said maybe 10 years. In another, Impossible CEO Pat Brown more or less said never.

Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Eat Just, reckons the timeline is “somewhere north of 15 years.” 

Eat Just, which is best known at this point for its plant-based egg products, is in the process of developing its own cell-based meats, including chicken nuggets and chicken breast. The north-of-15-years timeframe for those and other cell-based meat products comes from an important factor Tetrick pointed out when we chatted this week at SKS: that a successful prototype in a lab does not automatically equal commercial success. 

A lot must happen in between those two endpoints, prototype and commercialization, and during our talk, Tetrick broke the journey down into four distinct phases. These are as applicable to other food businesses as they are to Eat Just.

The first is getting that prototype out of the lab. Launching in a single restaurant is one example. To do this, companies need to have not only developed a prototype, they must also have gotten regulatory approval for their product. Tetrick told me that Eat Just hopes this step happens for his company this year or next.

The second phase moves companies out from a single location and into some restaurants, say 50–100, and perhaps smaller retailers. At the moment, there are no cell-based meat companies with products at this stage.

Phase three is even further off. That’s the point when a company’s products are on food retail shelves across the country, from Whole Foods in San Francisco to Walmart in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Eat Just is currently at this point with its plant-based egg products, which are in more than 17,000 locations in the U.S.

That final phase is what Tetrick calls “the Coca-Cola phase.” The product is available everywhere and at a low cost. He believes this is “the phase that will transform the planet,” meaning it will curb the larger population’s reliance on animal protein. To get to that kind of world, phase four is ultimately where Eat Just and other companies need to be.

Not that getting there will be easy. Tetrick doesn’t agree with Pat Brown’s statement that cell-based meat “is never going to be a thing,” but he does concede that it’s no easy feat. In fact, he equated the process from prototype to ubiquity with scaling a really tall mountain. “[It’s] not confusing what needs to be done, it’s just really hard.” 

That climb, so to speak, will require the right investments in cell line development, media, and bioreactors. It will require “a thoughtful approach” to working with regulators and an effective marketing strategy. It will involve enormous amounts of risk and millions if not billions of dollars.

Ultimately, Tetrick believes companies that can get us through this enormously difficult process will enable the majority of the population to live in a world where eating meat doesn’t necessarily mean slaughtering animals or destroying the planet. For many, getting there will be a mountain worth climbing.

SKS 2020: Impossible Foods CEO on Cell-Based Meat: “It’s Never Going to Be a Thing”

Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown didn’t mince words when asked about the future of cell-based meat today at the Smart Kitchen Summit. “That will never be a commercial endeavor,” Brown said. “The reason has to do with the fact that it’s irreversibly expensive.”

While Brown agreed with the sentiment behind cell-based meat — removing animals from our diets — he doesn’t think the concept is a viable solution. Brown said that if companies were able to recreate muscle cells, that technology would be used first for therapeutic purposes, which would be much more lucrative than selling a facsimile of animal products.

Brown went on to create a hypothetical example. If 200 years ago, he theorized, you tried to develop new transportation by recreating the muscle cells of a horse, “you miss the real opportunities” because you’d be “stuck with limitations of animal cells.”

Brown’s fiery assertion is bound to ruffle some feathers in the cell-based meat world, which is full of companies hard at work re-creating meats in the lab. Startups in the cultured meat sector have raised a lot of money just over this past year: Memphis Meat raised $161 million in January, Integriculture raised $7.4 million in May, New Age Meats raised $4.7 million for its cell-based pork in July, and Mosa Meat raised $55 million for its cell-based burgers just last month.

In addition to raising money, cell-based meat companies are busy developing a variety of products including briskets, shrimp, yellowtail, bacon and even kangaroo.

Though Brown definitely has a plant-based horse in this race, his point is something we at The Spoon have pondered before. If plant-based meat tastes this good, do we even need to make meat in a lab? The plant-based ground beefs and pork from both Impossible and Beyond Meat are delicious. Should more resources be funneled into the cultured meat space, which, according to the companies making cell-based meat, is still years away from commercial availability at scale?

As if to erase any doubt about his position on cell-based meat, Brown said “It’s never going to be a thing. I’d put any amount of money on that.”

SKS 2020: What Does It Take to Build a Cell-Based Protein Business?

If you keep an eye and ear to food tech, you’ll know there’s been a significant uptick in interest (and investment) for cell-based meat products. But what can companies in the space do to help cell-based protein scale to address issues like global food security and environmental sustainability? 

That’s a topic FTW Ventures’ Brian Frank discussed at this week’s SKS 2020 show, where he was joined by Benjamina Bollag, the founder and CEO of HigherSteaks, and Justin Kolbeck, CEO and cofounder of Wild Type. 

Since both Bollag and Kolbeck have founded cell-based meat companies (HigherSteaks is working on bacon and pork belly, Wild Type on salmon), they had a ton to say — more than can realistically be packed into a few hundred words.

Kolbeck summarized his advice by pointing to three things companies can think about: taste, affordability, and building the kind of story around the product that will attract your average consumer. For example, when we reach that far-off day where cell-based seafood is available at your local Publix, its branding might explain to shoppers that it contains zero mercury or antibiotics, or that it’s a more sustainable solution to wild-caught seafood from our oceans (which are overfished).

“The role of brands will be important to differentiate and distinguish between companies,” he said.

I say “far-off day” because no one is going to stroll into Publix tomorrow, or even next year, expecting to find cell-based meat and seafoods. All panelists agreed the timeframe for that reality is years away.

Part of the reason for that is the cost required to produce cell-based proteins. Bollag mentioned media — the liquid that gets fed to cells to make them grow — as one challenge. Growing those cell in bioreactors at scale is another massive hurdle, as is developing the scaffolding to give products the correct meat-like texture.

One thing that could address all of those tasks and challenges isn’t even a technology. It’s simply the concept of not doing everything in-house. A company that develops its own media, builds its own bioreactors, and simultaneously tries to navigate the regulatory challenges for cell-based meat is going to be slow in reaching commercialization. “Developing the IP yourself is not the most efficient way to do that,” said Kolbeck. Frank was even more to the point: “Cell-based [meat] companies cannot develop all the IP themselves.”

That presents a real opportunity for many kinds of businesses to get involved in the growth of cell-based meat, from those building bioreactors to companies developing cheaper serums to lawyers with expertise in the regulatory realm. All of those individuals and companies working together can help accelerate the timeline between now and when cell-based protein products reach our grocery store shelves. Only then can the planet and the population start to reap the widespread benefits of cell-based meat as an option.