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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cellular agriculture

Givaudan, Bühler Group, and Migros Open Doors to The Cultured Hub, a Scale-Up Facility for Cellular Agriculture

Three years after announcing a joint venture, Givaudan, Bühler Group, and Migros have finally opened the doors to The Cultured Hub, a cutting-edge biotech facility dedicated to cellular agriculture production in Kemptthal, Switzerland. Initially introduced in 2021 as the Cultured Food Innovation Hub with the stated mission of accelerating the development and market penetration of cellular agriculture products, the facility now boasts advanced product development labs as well as cell culture and bio-fermentation capabilities.

According to the announcement, the new facility will enable startups to scale up their processes from small-scale laboratory experiments (e.g., shake flasks) to 1,000-liter pilot operations without requiring expensive asset investments or equity dilution. The organization says the facility will allow emerging companies to access subject-matter experts and resources to “create regulatory batches with analysis and food safety procedures, test new products, work on optimizing processes, and conduct small market launches.”

In some ways, the new facility is reminiscent of MISTA, the San Francisco-based innovation hub resulting from a partnership between Givaudan and Bühler. However, unlike MISTA, which features facilities such as a biotech lab and an extrusion hub, The Cultured Hub’s infrastructure is specifically focused on cellular agriculture production for products such as cultivated beef, fish, dairy, and more.

“The Cultured Hub is designed to bridge the scale-up gap for companies, enabling them to retain equity, protect intellectual property, and fast-track their journey to market without high capital investment,” said Ian Roberts, Chief Technology Officer of Bühler Group. “We are thrilled to bring together industry players and create a collaborative environment that will drive significant advancements in the industry.”

The rise of shared-access facilities for piloting new cell-ag food products makes sense in today’s capital-constrained environment. Venture capital investment in cultivated food startups has slowed over the past couple of years, particularly as capital requirements have risen with many of these companies entering the scale-up phase. At the same time, it remains uncertain whether many of these products will ever reach the commodity price points required to make them viable replacements for traditional animal agriculture.

Notable companies participating in The Cultured Hub’s community include Ever After Foods, GOURMEY, Mosa Meat, Nestlé, Nutreco, and Orbillion Bio.

Dispatches from Israel Food Tech Ecosystem: Daphna Heffetz, CEO of Wanda Fish

Daphna Heffetz is the CEO and Co-Founder of Wanda Fish, a cellular agriculture company aimed at producing cell-based fish meat, starting with bluefin tuna. We talked about making cell-based fish entirely out of plant materials, the problems our oceans face today, and why Wanda Fish will only sell to high end restaurants to start. 

J: Tell me about your background and how you came to be the CEO and co-founder of Wandafish. 

D: I have been around for a long time in the biotechnology industry but focusing on life sciences. Almost two years ago, the Kitchen Hub approached me and tried to interest me in establishing Wanda Fish. I didn’t know enough about the issues of the ocean at that time, so I started to read and speak to several people. 

J: Can you tell me more about what Wanda Fish does and what makes it unique from other cell-based fish products? 

D: What we are doing is a variety of cultivated fish filets. Our strategy is to have a premium product that originates from the top fish species like bluefin tuna and yellowtail. We produce a whole-cut fish filet consisting of muscle and fat cells and make it similar to the fish itself by taking all the elements from the fish itself. We first take a one-time single sample of the fish tissue and never go back to the fish. We separate required cells, mainly muscle, and fat, which compose the fish filet and grow them in the same manner they would grow in the fish body. We are doing it in the lab initially and later on in a hygienic manufacturing facility in a bioreactor. All the elements are plant-based, no animal is used as the animal components are replaced with plant-based ones. We don’t add any supplements or additives because all the cells are taken from the fish and have the elements from the fish itself. 

J: What is the significance of the problem that Wanda Fish solves? 

D: The reason it’s so needed is because the population of the world is growing so rapidly. Also, the ocean is becoming very much polluted and 80% of its pollution is manmade. Also, there is unregulated fishing which is causing many types of fish to be endangered. More than 70% of the oxygen we all breathe is from the ocean. 

J: What stage is Wanda Fish currently at? 

D: It is already in the lab stage but in process development and gradual scaling. We are working with tabletop bioreactors that have all the elements of big bioreactors. 

J: Who are the ultimate customers? 

D: The product at the beginning will be served to restaurants. However, at the next stage, it will be sold in retail and you can get it in the supermarket. 

J: What is the reason for this strategy? 

D: More companies that are more advanced in us that started in 2017 or 2018 are also looking to sell to restaurants. One of the reasons for that is that it’s like a clinical study, you are selling to people, and you get feedback. Also, this helps spread branding. And most of all, in restaurants, the selling price is higher. Even before having price parity, you can sell to restaurants without losing money because the price point is much higher. 

J: Is there a specific type of restaurant that you are selling to? 

D: Because we are focusing on the top fish species, we are looking to start in high-end restaurants. This will be everywhere, hopefully in Asia and Japan and in the U.S. and Israel. We are going to do sales in countries based on the economic and regulatory situation. 

J: What are the challenges of adapting to sell in different markets? 

D: Unique market education. Because we won’t be the first in the market since there are a couple of companies ahead of us, still in production, market education will be minimal when we enter the market. In principle, there are some voluntary organizations, like GFI, that have done market and consumer research on the consumer world already. Through them, we have ideas of market acceptance. 

J: What do the next few years look like for you, and what are the goals that you are trying to hit? 

D: We are progressing with bluefin tuna as our first product and gradually scaling up with cost reduction and price parity. This can be done by increasing the density of cells in the bioreactors, lower-cost ingredients, and recycling of the medium. We are starting the regulatory process in several territories and hoping to collaborate with big international food suppliers. 

J: When do you think you’ll be ready for market? 

D: This will take a couple of years, but the goal is to be in the market in 2026.

What’s Next For Cellular Agriculture: 5 Takeaways From Tufts Cellular Agriculture Innovation Day

Pioneers in cellular agriculture came together in Boston last week to discuss the state of the industry – and what it will take to take cell-cultivated products to the next level.

Tufts University’s inaugural Cellular Agriculture Innovation Day featured panel discussions with industry leaders, researchers, and other experts. The panelists reflected on how far the technology to grow meat and other products has come over the last decade, and shared their visions of how that momentum will continue over the next few years.

A decade ago, “you could count the number of people dedicated to cellular agriculture on one hand,” said Isha Datar, executive director of the research nonprofit New Harvest, in a panel discussion at the event.

“To see 10 years go by, and to see 150 companies pop up, so much private investment pop up, lots more people in the academic space – to me, it’s like, ‘okay, the party has been started,’” Datar said.


All eyes on cell culture media

Cellular agriculture has many research and development hurdles to clear in coming years, said Mark Post, chief scientific officer at Mosa Meats, in a panel discussion.

In particular, the industry still needs to work “quite extensively” on the cost-effectiveness – and in particular, the resource efficiency – of its manufacturing processes, Post said.

The biggest cost driver for cell-cultivated products today is culture media: the nutrient-rich material that supports the growth of cells.

According to Andrew Stout, a PhD student focusing on cultivated cell lines and culture media at Tufts University, the cellular agriculture field has already seen success in cutting costs for some culture media components, such as growth factors.

Those components were the “low-hanging fruit” of culture media, Stout said at the event.

Moving forward, researchers in the field will likely address “the next lowest fruit,” such as amino acids and vitamins, he said.


Collaborating to solve key questions

Datar, the executive director at New Harvest, forecast that industry players will increasingly find answers to their questions by working together.

Much of the news from the industry in recent years has concerned individual companies and products – but over the next decade, we’ll hear more about how different companies and other players are working together to “solve [the] puzzle,” Datar said.

In particular, companies collaboratively address the challenge of scaling up using shared facilities, she said.

In 2021, we saw an announcement for one such facility in Europe: the Cultured Food Innovation Hub planned by Swiss flavor manufacturer Givaudan and other partners. The companies planned the Innovation Hub as a space for startups to access shared equipment, enabling more players to innovate in the field at lower cost.


Securing public funding

Bruce Friedrich, president and co-founder of the Good Food Institute, forecast that public funding will play an increasingly important role in helping the industry to address challenges of cost and scale.

In the last three years, governments around the world have already “gone from almost zero to hundreds of millions of dollars” in funding, Friedrich said.

Friedrich laid out a vision of government funding for cellular agriculture that would mirror investments in renewable energy and electric vehicles.

In the U.S., there could be bipartisan support for spending to support the industry, he said – pointing to efforts by the Good Food Institute to communicate with Republican lawmakers about the potential employment and economic benefits of such spending.


Introducing cell-cultivated products to the public

The speakers at the Tufts event also addressed the need to continue improving cell-cultivated products themselves before introducing them to consumers.

For Post, the chief scientific officer at Mosa Meats, one step to improve product quality could be improving the differentiation of muscle and fat tissues.

Academia can help to improve the quality of cell-cultivated products by identifying which genetic features can identify cells that will produce tasty end-products, according to Stout, the PhD student at Tufts University.

According to David Block, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Davis, another task for academia will be to ensure that cell-cultivated products are nutritionally equivalent to their conventional equivalents.

But the industry also has “an opportunity” to take more control over the nutritional quality and safety of its products than conventional agriculture, because cell-cultivated products are grown in much more controlled environments, Block said in a panel discussion at the event.


Moving toward semi-industrialization

The industry has begun to receive its first regulatory stamps of approval, and is “at the verge of getting regulatory approval in a lot of geographies,” according to Post.

In November, UPSIDE Foods became the first company to receive a “no questions” letter from the FDA – meaning the agency determined that the company’s cell-cultivated chicken is safe for consumers.

Eat Just, a San-Francisco startup, became the first company to receive regulatory approval for cell-cultivated meat when the Singapore Food Agency green-lit its cell-cultivated chicken in 2020.

With regulatory clearance in the works, and factories beginning to be built, “we are really getting to the level where [the industry] becomes sort of semi-industrial,” Post said.

But he added: “It will take a long time before [cell-cultivated products] will be a substantial part of markets where eventually we can make an impact on the environment, which is the root of all this.”

Uma Valeti, chief executive officer of UPSIDE Foods, said that it could be between 10 and 30 years before cultivated meat “takes off.”

Breaking: UPSIDE Becomes First Company to Get Greenlight From the U.S. FDA For Cultivated Meat

Today UPSIDE Foods announced it has become the first company in the world to receive a “No Questions” letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for cultivated meat, poultry, or seafood. This letter signals that the FDA believes UPSIDE’s cultivated chicken is safe for consumers.

This is big news for UPSIDE and the broader alt-protein industry since it’s the first time that the FDA has greenlit a cultivated meat product. The approval moves the U.S. market one step closer to seeing meat made via cellular agriculture sold to consumers.

“This is a watershed moment in the history of food,” said Dr. Uma Valeti, CEO and Founder of UPSIDE Foods. “We started UPSIDE amid a world full of skeptics, and today, we’ve made history again as the first company to receive a ‘No Questions’ letter from the FDA for cultivated meat. This milestone marks a major step towards a new era in meat production, and I’m thrilled that U.S. consumers will soon have the chance to eat delicious meat that’s grown directly from animal cells.”

Along with the FDA’s memo detailing the agency’s review of the data and information provided by UPSIDE Foods to establish the safety of its cultivated chicken filet, it’s also released a 104-page document prepared by UPSIDE Foods that details the safety of the cultivated chicken and its production process.

While this is a big step, don’t expect to see UPSIDE’s chicken on store shelves in the immediate future. According to the release, UPSIDE Foods still needs to secure the necessary approvals from USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) before UPSIDE Foods’ cultivated chicken can be sold to consumers. According to the company, details on the launch timing will follow.

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

Fat is sexy, don’t you know? In particular, the type of fat made without killing any animals.

One company working on such a fat is Cultimate Foods, a Berlin-based startup developing cultivated fat for hybrid alt-meat products. The company announced it has raised a pre-seed €700 thousand round led by Big Idea Ventures, ProVeg International, and Realum.cloud.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Cultimate plans on targeting its cultivated fat at food companies interested in developing hybrid plant-based meat products. The company, which claims its cultivated fat replicates the structure of animal fat tissue, says it uses a “unique technological approach to 3D cultivation creates the structure of their ingredient and reduces the costs of production.”

“Our ultimate goal is to deliver a game-changing ingredient for the plant-based meat industry,” said Cultimate cofounder George Zheleznyi. “We are focused on developing the most important part of meat experience, fat. Cultimate will deliver all the properties of meat that are currently lacking in the available meat alternatives.”

Zheleznyi previously cofounded a Russian-based alt-meat startup called Greenwise. His cofounders at Cultimate include Eugenia Sagué (co-CEO, ex-ProVeg) and Oskar Latyshev (CTO, ex-Partner M).

Cultimate enters an increasingly crowded market for alt-fat products. San Francisco-based Mission Barns raised a significant round last year to help it scale up its cell-cultured fat, and Steakholder Foods (previously MeaTech 3D) is also working on a cultivated fat for its 3D-printed alt-steaks.

Cultimate says it plans to use its new funding to validate its cultivated fat product and begin to prepare for pilot-stage production.

Finless Foods Dual-Pronged Strategy Targets the Plant-Based and Cell-Cultured Based Tuna Markets

Environmental concerns, shortages in the supply chain, and a global focus on health are fueling excitement at the prospect of a cell-cultured food industry featuring meat, poultry, and seafood produced without the slaughter of animals. At this point, however, it’s an industry with high hopes whose players are willing to gamble time and money as the USDA and FDA ponder the establishment of guidelines for product safety, labeling, and other consumer considerations.

Finless Foods, based in Emeryville, California, is bullish on the future of its lab-cultivated Bluefin tuna. Still, the company is mitigating its risk by releasing a plant-grown tuna in the coming months. Armed with some new Series B funding to the tune of $34 million, Finless is anticipating government approval by the end of the year and is building out an 11,000 square-foot pilot production plant in Emeryville to meet what it hopes is consumer acceptance and widespread distribution.

“The FDA has already rubberstamped the blueprints for our facility,” Finless CEO Michael Selden told The Spoon in a recent interview. “We should be finished with construction in about three months.”

The dual-pronged strategy of initially releasing a plant-based tuna, the main ingredient of which is winter melon) makes sense for a company with more than $48 million raised. It purports to have a pleasing taste and color and similar mouthfeel to “real” tuna. Focused on Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami, Selden said that it will help in brand building and drive revenue before its cell-cultivated tuna is ready for the market.”

Selden won’t give a specific date for Finless’ plant-based tuna release, but he claims it has received great reviews from its sampling at the South Beach Food and Wine Festival and New York Wine and Food Festival.

Once the joint efforts of the USDA and FDA establish guidelines for lab-grown meat, poultry, and seafood, Seldon said that the initial focus would be on foodservice firms for distribution. He does not rule out a direct-to-consumer play as the market matures.

“That’s something I’d like to do in the future,” Selden said of selling to consumers via a subscription service. “Americans, at least from the data I’ve seen, aren’t used to doing that for seafood.”

“Because it’s a new thing, we wanted people to get used to it in typical settings such as in restaurants,” the Finless CEO added. “From there, If we build a strong brand presence, we can expand and create a more omnichannel approach.”

The is a method to Finless’ madness in selecting Bluefin as its first foray into the cell-cultivate fish business. Seldon said that while other species, such as salmon, have prior established research on their structure, with Bluefin, there is no existing work, making the reward for the company’s efforts much more lucrative.

“We wanted to come out with something people perceive as very high quality,” Selden said. “On top of that, it’s not democratized, which makes it very expensive. Skipjack or Blue Eye (tuna) is 15 dollars a pound. Bluefin is closer to $40 a pound. It also has much higher levels of omegas.”

Japan’s Dainichi Corp is among Finless’ investors, which makes sense given Japan makes up 90% of the world’s consumer consumption of Bluefin tuna. Having a home-grown financial partner will allow Finless to make a quick splash when the Japanese market has its regulatory approval completed.

“It helps with understanding the market,” Selden said of the Japanese opportunity. “For example, Japanese customers like a different cut of tuna. Americans like otoro, the fattiest cut of tuna while in Japan, they prefer chutoro, the second fattiest cut.”

Finless is not alone in the cell-cultivate fish business. Wildtype, a company that recently raised $100 million, is a healthy competitor, although Selden said its focus is more on Amberjack than the more costly Bluefin. San Diego-based BlueNalu is also in the space, but Selden believes the company has yet to develop a working prototype.

Regulation of the cell-based meat, poultry, and seafood world is being mapped out by a joint effort of the USDA and FDA. Although, once rules are finalized, the FDA will have jurisdiction over the seafood space. Singapore and Qatar are the only two countries with regulations for the cell-cultivated food industry. As reported in The Spoon, the Netherlands’ House of Representatives passed a motion to make the sampling of cell-cultured meat legal.

Investor Look: 10 Trends to Watch in Ag + Food Tech in 2022

Food, ocean and agtech venture fund S2G Ventures released a report citing ten catalysts that will shape intersecting industries including agriculture, food manufacturing, nutrition and food retail in 2022. The report examines the trends that are driving the transition to a climate-smart, healthy food system.

S2G — investor in several food and agtech startups — looks at technology disruption in three major categories including agricultural innovation, supply chain disruption and personalized food and nutrition.

“The food transition is still in its infancy but is being propelled by seismic tailwinds: massive demographic change spurring new consumer demand, significant advancements in the biology, chemistry and physics of food production to create new choices and now capital markets anchored by ESG that want to fund high growth, disruptive companies,” commented Sanjeev Krishnan, S2G Ventures Managing Director and Chief Investment Officer.

Farmers in the US are facing new challenges every day from nutrient-challenged soil to lack of access to capital. The S2G report describes the ways that innovation in fintech, robotics and biotech along with an increase in socially and environmentally conscious investing (ESG) will lead to the “fourth industrial revolution” in farms across the country.

The drivers of innovation in farming include:

  • Robots will increase efficiency while reducing labor needs across the food system.
  • The rise of ESG will help to digitize the farm.
  • Fintech will transform opportunities in agriculture, just as it did for the student loan and mortgage markets.
  • RNA technology that saved lives during Covid-19 will be applied to farms to save soils.

Supply chain disruptions experienced over the past two years have catalyzed both governmental institutions NGOs and the private sectors to fund and drive innovation in biotech, cellular agriculture and food waste solutions. The result according to S2G Ventures will be supply chains that are more nimble, sustainable, localized and less wasteful.

Innovations that will revolutionize supply chains include:

  • Fermentation will power the next generation of alternative protein products.
  • Cellular protein will provide consumers around the world with safe, sustainable food.
  • Adoption of food waste solutions will be recognized as both a good business practice and an essential tool for feeding the world.

Even prior to the pandemic, consumers were demonstrating a desire for better food choices and a renewed focus on ways to personalize their nutrition and healthcare. To answer this demand, food and nutrition startups are using cutting-edge bio and food science as well as AI and machine learning to develop nutrient-dense, functional and personalized food products.

Personalized food & nutrition catalysts include:

  • AI and machine learning platforms will unlock greater understanding of and use cases for plants and fungi.
  • Food will become central to the effort to prevent chronic disease and improve health outcomes.
  • Food brands and grocers will have to “personalize or perish.”

To dig into more details on areas to watch in food and agtech this year, download the full report from S2G Ventures.

What Does a Cultivated Meat Plant Look Like? Take a Video Tour of UPSIDE Foods’ New Production Facility to Find Out

According to the Good Food Institute, there are approximately 70+ companies working on cultivated meat services, inputs, and end products. At this time, Singapore has been the only country to offer regulatory approval for the commercial sale of cultivated meat, and Qatar is expected to be next to do so. Despite this, several companies in the cultured meat space have opened up state-of-the-art facilities to develop their alternative meat products in anticipation of receiving regulatory approval sooner than later.

One of these companies is UPSIDE Foods (formerly Memphis Meats). Last week, UPSIDE Foods hosted a ceremony to celebrate the unveiling of its 53,000 square foot Engineering, Production, and Innovation Center (EPIC for short). The center will be used for the production of cultivated meat and the development of new types of meat and product formats.

It’s easy enough to find Youtube videos about how plant-based meat or real hamburger is made, but because the cultivated meat industry is so nascent, behind-the-scenes looks at this industry have been harder to come by. Until now. UPSIDE Foods shared a video tour of the inside of its EPIC facility. Take a look:

UPSIDE Foods Grand Opening

The front of the facility hosts a kitchen for hosting tastings of cultivated meat. There are areas dedicated to the milling and mixing of cell feed, as well as areas for packaging and testing products. Products will be tested for safety and quality in EPIC’s quality assurance facilities. UPSIDE has also provided an office for federal inspectors to oversee every process, which is required in all meat and poultry processing facilities in the U.S

UPSIDE’s innovation center will employ about 50 people throughout different departments, including maintenance, production, quality & food safety, engineering, and plant management.

Less than half, or only about 40 percent, of Americans are willing to try cultivated meat. Hopefully, allowing consumers to get a glance into cultivated meat facilities might help them warm up to the idea of this alternative protein.

Want to see a cultivated meat facility in action for yourself? UPSIDE will begin offering in-person tours at its Emeryville, California facilities in January 2022.

BIOMILQ Raises $21M in Series A Funding With Focus on Mission-Aligned Partners

In June, The Spoon reported on North Carolina-based startup BIOMILQ’s success in recreating human milk outside of the breast. The company is working toward manufacturing cell-cultured milk at commercial scale, hoping to provide parents who cannot breastfeed regularly with a nutritionally equivalent option.

BIOMILQ announced today that they’ve closed their Series A financing round with $21 million. This week, The Spoon got on Zoom with company co-founder and CEO Michelle Egger to discuss the funding round and BIOMILQ’s next steps toward commercialization.

“In the grand scheme of fundraising rounds in cellular agriculture, $21 million is par for the course,” says Egger. “But we’re particularly proud because we’re an all-female leadership team. It’s less about celebrating the dollar value and more about celebrating the fact that we were able to raise it with specific partnership criteria that helped us find mission-aligned partners.”

During the round, BIOMILQ focused on identifying funds that employed female partners; that had company portfolios in which at least 10% of founders came from diverse or non-traditional backgrounds; and that had mandates on nutrition, health, or sustainability in their investment criteria.

Egger says that those criteria narrowed the field of potential investors, but ultimately helped the team to connect with partners “that are furthering new ideas and new innovation from areas where we otherwise wouldn’t see it.” Those partners include Novo Holdings, Gaingels, Spero, and Digitalis.

This round of funding will help BIOMILQ to bring its production processes to scale. Currently, the company produces small sample quantities of cell-cultured milk—just enough for compositional and optimization testing, according to Egger. They’re currently building a pilot plant in North Carolina, where they hope to begin producing milk in the quantities required for safety testing before launching the product.

In grappling with the challenge of building up scale, BIOMILQ is in the same boat as cell-cultured meat startups. But Egger says that the process for, and challenges of, producing cell-cultured milk are unique.

“Our product isn’t cells; our product is what the cells produce,” she says. “In cellular agriculture, they’re growing meat to replace the way cattle farmers have traditionally raised bovine cattle to slaughter. We’re more like milkmaids, raising cells to act more like dairy cows, where they’re able to produce milk—in this case, human milk.”

In contrast to cellular agriculture, BIOMILQ’s process is more similar to pharmaceutical production than fermentation production in terms of scale and price.

There are some advantages that come with playing the role of cellular milkmaid. For instance, BIOMILQ doesn’t need its cells to grow explosively, but to secrete milk—so the company’s process requires relatively small quantities of expensive growth factors.

BIOMILQ also stands out from the crowd of cell cultivation startups because the company uses human epithelial cells to produce its milk. The use of human cells comes with its own challenges, as the company has had to prove to the FDA’s Institutional Review Boards that donors consented fully to the use of their cells. “In the past, human research hasn’t always been upfront about how cells were being utilized,” says Egger. “So it’s top-of-mind for us, as the first food product created from human cells.”

The regulatory pathway for BIOMILQ remains unclear, although the company is actively working with regulators.

Egger says that the company “might be a bit quieter” over the next year or two, as the team works on building up scale and undergoing safety testing. Still, she’s excited about these next steps.

“We get to pioneer a new future of nutrition and push forward technologies that have never been applied in this way,” says Egger, “which is very exciting. And it’s also a huge challenge that we take very seriously, because at the end of the day, the product we’re making isn’t a novel hamburger or a novel chicken nugget—it’s nutrition that supports the life of human beings on our planet.”

Image credit: BIOMILQ

USDA Awards $10 Million to Tufts University to Establish a Cultivated Protein Center of Excellence

Today the USDA and Tufts University announced a $10 million award to be distributed over a 5 year period to develop an Institute for Cellular Agriculture, a flagship American cultivated protein research center of excellence. The award is part of a $146 million investment announced by the USDA on October 6th by its National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) Sustainable Agricultural Systems program.

The new Institute will be run by David Kaplan, who currently heads the Cellular Agriculture program at Tufts University.

From the release:

Tufts University Professor David Kaplan, a renowned cultivated meat expert, will lead the initiative and will be joined by investigators from Virginia Tech, Virginia State, University of California-Davis, MIT, and University of Massachusetts-Boston. The new institute will “develop outreach, extension, and education for the next generation of professionals” in cellular agriculture and lead research that will help to expand the menu of climate-friendly protein options and improve food system resilience.

The new program is the first federally funded Institute at a major university with the explicit goal of developing new approaches and technologies for cultivated meat. The project includes the development of new sustainable and cruelty-free growth medium, scaffolding, and fermentation technologies that can contribute to the advancement of the cultivated meat field.

The program also aims to develop a curriculum to educate students to be future leaders in the cultivated meat space. One of the goals of the Institute will be to develop “outreach, extension, and education for the next generation of professionals for workforce development and as technology leaders.”

It’s encouraging to see the Biden administration investing in research centers of excellence for cellular agriculture, particularly cultivated meat. The US has fallen woefully behind other countries in its support for developing next-generation food technology, which is why I suggested early this year that the Biden administration create a US taxpayer-funded food innovation hub. This, in essence, does that for cultivated meat.

It’s also a sign that the US education system is racing to develop a curriculum for a field that – at least up to this point – has lacked the kind of well-established curriculum as other strategically essential fields such as computer science or biotechnology. That’s a shame because while the cultivated meat industry leverages many of the advances in other areas like biotech and CS, it’s a unique field unto itself which requires an educated and qualified workforce to power if it is to reach its full potential.

Hopefully, the new National Institute for Cellular Agriculture at Tufts is another building block that will help create the foundation for the cultivated meat workforce of the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”