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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cellular agriculture

Future Fields is Making Serum-Free Media to Help Companies Grow Cheaper Meat

Up in Alberta, Canada, a young startup is quietly working to accelerate the production of cultured meat.

Future Fields is developing a key to unlock the potential of cellular agriculture: animal-free media. For those not in the know, media is the liquid, nutrient-dense “food” that allows animal cells to rapidly grow and form meat in a lab. It’s also one of the most expensive aspects of the cultured meat process, partially because the go-to media right now — Fetal Bovine Serum — is extremely expensive (and controversial).

Future Fields is developing an animal-free media which it will sell to cellular agriculture and biotech companies alike. If effective, it will help drive down manufacturing costs for cell-based meat. The serum is specifically made for cultured chicken cells and is expected to be available within two years. According to Future Fields co-founder Lejjy Gafour, who spoke to me on the phone last week, media is more effective when it’s specialized for one specific type of cell line.

Down the road, Future Fields wants to use its unique media to develop its next product: actual cultured chicken. The company plans to initially sell their poultry to secondary processors and then eventually develop their own line of consumer-ready products. If they stay within their two-year timeline for the serum, Gafour says they plan to have the cell-based chicken to market in five to seven years.

If so, that puts them well behind other cultured meat companies like Memphis Meats or Mosa Meats, both of which have claimed they’ll have cultured meat to market by 2021. There’s also JUST, who hopes to make the first sale of cell-based meat by the end of this year. In more direct competition, Japanese company Integriculture is also developing a food-grade media which can be used to make cultured meat.

Photo: Future Fields.

However, there are definite advantages to being one of the later entrants in the cell ag space. That means that other companies can shoulder the burden of figuring out cost-efficient production strategies, beginning to familiarize consumers with the concept of cell-based meat, and, most importantly, nailing down regulatory frameworks. By the time Future Fields enters the market with their cultured chicken, they’re no doubt hoping there will already be an established cell-based ecosystem in place.

In the end, it won’t really matter who gets to market first. The cellular agriculture space is new and has a lot of potential, especially if consumer concern around the negative environmental impact of animal agriculture continues to grow. “There’s room for a lot of players in the [cell-based meat] ecosystem,” Gafour told me.

That’s not to say that Future Fields won’t have its fair share of hurdles. The company has yet to publicly put its media or cultured chicken to the test, and it doesn’t have any outside funding. It also seems overly ambitious for such a small company to have multiple areas of focus. Future Fields is creating an animal-free media, developing a cell-based chicken product and, eventually plans to make its own branded product.

It’s probably best for Future Fields to focus their attention on the product with they could have the most wide-reaching impact: culture media. Hopefully the company can help put cell-based meat on our plates a lot sooner.

Clara Foods Raises Series B, Partners with Ingredion to Launch Animal-Free Egg Whites

Today Clara Foods, a startup using cellular agriculture to develop animal-free proteins, announced it has raised a Series B funding round. The round was led by ingredients corporation Ingredion with participation from Hemisphere Ventures, SOS Ventures and B37. The amount of funding was not disclosed.

Based in San Francisco, Clara Foods has been working to create animal proteins without the animals. They use a similar technology to Perfect Day or New Culture, feeding sugar to genetically engineered yeast to “ferment” protein in various forms. So far, Clara Foods has been focused on creating egg whites to use as vegan alternatives in baking.

Under the agreement, Ingredion will work with Clara Foods to distribute and market multiple animal-free proteins means to be used as egg substitutes.

Photo: Meringues made with animal-free egg whites from Clara Foods.

This partnership gives a big leg up to Clara Foods. The startup has been developing its chicken-less egg whites since 2014. When I visited the Clara Foods team a few months ago at the Winter Fancy Food Show, they told me it would likely still be a while before they brought a product to market. Now, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that their “egg” proteins could be available as soon as 2020.

Clara Foods’ partnership with Ingredion is a smart way for them to leverage the massive ingredient provider’s manufacturing capabilities, supply chain, and retail partnerships to get to market much more quickly. Perfect Day made a similar strategic partnership last year when they teamed up with ADM to accelerate production of their animal-free whey.

This is also a smart move on Ingredion’s part. The ingredient supplier has had its eye on the vegan protein space for a while. In fact, its investment in Clara Foods comes months after Ingredion committed to investing $140 million in plant-based proteins. True, Clara Foods’ proteins are made through fermentation, not from plants, but still: Ingredion knows that alternative proteins are a hot investment opportunity, and it’s making moves.

In its press release Clara Foods stated that it had raised a $15 million Series A in 2016. (Though Crunchbase reports that the startup’s total funding — prior to the Series B — was only $3.5 million.) In addition to jumpstarting manufacturing, Clara Foods will also use its new funding to expand beyond egg proteins and develop other animal-free products.

“Cellular Aquaculture” Company BlueNalu Raises $4.5 Million

By now, you’ve probably heard of cultured (or lab-grown) meat. But what about cultured seafood? That’s what BlueNalu, a San Diego-based startup, is working on.

The company is developing cellular aquaculture, in which living cells are taken from fish and grown, using culture media, to create seafood. Basically it’s cellular agriculture, but for seafood instead of beef or pork.

Today BlueNalu got some new wind in their sales: the company announced that they raised a $4.5 million seed round. New Crop Capital led the round, with participation by 25 VC firms and individuals from the U.S., U.K., Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Israel (a country which is turning out to be a hotbed of clean meat innovation).

This news is pretty impressive, considering the company was just established two months ago. It also indicates a strong interest in clean seafood. BlueNalu isn’t the only company working in the space; Wild Type is currently developing cultured salmon and Finless Foods is working on lab-grown bluefin tuna. So far this year, both companies have each raised $3.5 million.

There’s no word yet on whether BlueNalu will try to develop their own clean seafood product or license out their cellular aquaculture tech to other companies. But the amount of money they raised mean that people (this reporter included) are pretty excited to see just what exactly cellular aquaculture can do.

Catch Video from the New Harvest Cultured Meat Conference

You can tell a market sector is heating up when it gets its own conference. Cellular agriculture, which includes cultured meat (or lab meat or clean meat or whatever you want to call it) is definitely getting hotter as people gather today and tomorrow at the New Harvest 2018 conference over at MIT.

New Harvest is a non-profit advocacy group for the advancement of research into products like cultured meat, and its conference bills itself as “the world’s first conference dedicated to cellular agriculture.” If you are at all interested in the future of cultured meat and alterna-proteins, this looks like the place to be, with a tremendous lineup of researchers and exhibitors.

Startup activity in the cultured meat space has been downright frothy. Memphis Meats, Mosa Meat, JUST, Aleph Farms, and Supermeat are all working on cultured meat, and even traditional animal protein giant Tyson is getting into the lab meat space with its investment in Future Meat. And that list doesn’t even include the plant-based meat companies coming to market like Impossible and Beyond Meat.

Cultured meat has also caught the eye of the government, with the FDA recently holding a public meeting over what to call cultured meat (as well as the agency’s intent to crack down on which products can be called “milk“). Traditional ranchers and farmers have a beef with these upstarts who want to label their products, well, “beef.” This debate is just beginning, and conferences like New Harvest help push the conversation and research forward to move cellular agriculture from the lab to our tables.

If you can’t be in the Boston area for this weekend’s conference, you can check out video from the talks here. I should note, the video is broadcast via Periscope and the quality is definitely not HD. We’ve embedded a sample below, and you can check out all the talks here courtesy of the Cultured Meat and Future Food podcast.

Mosa Meat Raises $8.8 Million to Bring Clean Meat to Market by 2021

This morning The Wall Street Journal reported that Mosa Meat, the Netherlands-based clean meat company making slaughter-free beef from cattle cells, raised $8.8 million (€7.5 million) in funding from German drugmaker Merck KGaA and leading Swiss meat manufacturer Bell Food Group.

Mosa Meat was founded by Dr. Mark Post (now their Chief Scientific Officer), a professor of physiology at Maastricht University who made history when he created the world’s first lab-grown burger. The burger, which was cooked and eaten live on air in London in 2013, cost $330,000 (€250,000) to make and was funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. While it received mixed reviews from its tasters, the project prompted Post to create Mosa Meats in 2015.

Merck and Bell Food Group join the ever-growing list of Big Food and biotech companies investing in cultured meat companies. Tyson Foods has funded both Future Meat and Memphis Meats, which also counts Cargill amongst its investors, and poultry producer PHW Group has backed Israeli clean meat company Supermeat.

This investment is strategic for Mosa as well, beyond the obvious money part. Merck, one of Mosa Meats’ investors, has expertise in producing cell media, one of the biggest costs behind cultured meat. Combine that with the other investor, meat manufacturer Bell Food Group, and the Dutch startup has both the upstream and downstream of clean meat production covered.

Mosa Meats is aiming to get the first lab-grown meat product to market by 2021 at a price point of $10 per patty. This is on par with the timeline from other leaders in the field, namely Memphis Meats. JUST Foods, formerly Hampton Creek, claims it will make the first clean meat sale by the end of this year — though some are skeptical. Cultured fish production is on a slightly faster timeline; Finless Foods estimates they’ll be able to produce clean bluefin tuna at cost with the “real stuff” by 2019.

Mosa’s news comes less than a week after the FDA held a public meeting on cultured meat. We spoke with Annie Cull, Director of Communications at the Good Food Institute, who said that the FDA was very open and receptive to the idea of bringing clean meat to market. “They set a strong tone, which was ‘we’re ready for this,'” she said.

In short, clean meat is coming — and pretty darn soon. But we have a ways to go in terms of regulation, terminology, and public perception before it gets here.

CAS Wants You (and Everyone Else) to Know About Cellular Agriculture

Maybe you’ve heard of this thing called ‘cellular agriculture.’ It’s basically the practice of creating animal products from animal cells, instead of entire animals — and it’s the science behind producing meat (and eggs, and dairy, even leather and gelatin) in labs.

Clean (or cultured, or lab-grown) meat has generated a lot of media attention lately, especially as the FDA gears up to hold a public meeting about how they’ll categorize and regulate this new food product. But despite the buzz, plenty of people are still unclear about what exactly clean meat is, and how it’s made.

It’s that confusion that Kristopher Gasteratos, founder and president of the Cellular Agriculture Society (CAS), wants to change. He launched CAS in March of this year with a mission: to accelerate the commercialization of cellular agriculture.

A key part of their work is education. CAS is partnering with the Good Food Institute (GFI), an organization working to promote cultured and plant-based meat, to develop academic courses focused specifically on cellular agriculture and clean meat. At the moment, these type of classes don’t exist — at least not as more than a one-off.

CAS hopes to unveil their first course this fall through an undisclosed university. They also have roughly a dozen student organizations at universities in Mexico, Japan, and the U.S. working to spread the word about cellular agriculture on-campus through events, grassroots efforts, and tabling.

On the business side, CAS also works with cellular ag companies to help further their goals. In addition to the seven partners listed on their site, which includes Finless Foods, Supermeat, and PerfectDay, Gasteratos listed three more clean meat company partners over the phone. Organizations might come to CAS with new Cell Ag ventures they want to get off the ground, funding needs, or requests to bolster existing companies. 

“We work on things that people haven’t necessarily requested, but we think could be really useful,” said Gasteratos. For example, their team is developing a children’s book to introduce kids to cellular ag, and are working with the military. They also aren’t afraid to pursue some… slightly unorthodox projects for the greater good; they’re working with companies that use cellular agriculture technology to make dog meat (no, not pet food — dog meat), wearable furs, and rhino horns. Which sounds pretty off-putting, until you realize that if these products are successfully made animal cells, they’ll be able to reduce the amount of whole animals killed.

Perhaps most interestingly, CAS is also in the midst of creating a digital communal space for cellular ag-lovers to meet and discuss ideas. While it’s not yet built, the CAS Collaborative Center (C^3) will be a “pillar” of their mission, according to Gasteratos. “It will be like a Reddit, Facebook, or Slack, but custom-made for Cell Ag,” he said.

To join, volunteers fill out a form with their areas of interest (religion, media, and social science are just a few examples). After they’re accepted into the space, they’ll be able to communicate with academics, activists, and entrepreneurs in the cellular agriculture field. It’s basically grassroots community organizing for the 21st-century meets Shojinmeat’s cultured meat Slack channel.

CAS isn’t the only nonprofit working to support this growing field. The aforementioned Good Food Institute and New Harvest are two others who fund, advise, and supply resources to new cellular ag companies. Gasteratos said overcrowding wasn’t an issue — in fact, it was an opportunity. “The field is so new, and everything is collaborative,” he told me over the phone.

The nonprofit is funded by individual donors, foundations, and philanthropic contributors from investors. They have 10 executive board members, including GFI’s executive director Bruce Friedrich and Shojinmeat’s Yuki Hanyu, and roughly 20-30 people on the team. They’re currently a VIP Venture at the Harvard Innovation Lab, where Gasteratos was a student.

“Everything has to fall into the mission: help people, animals, and the world,” said Gasteratos. Hopefully, along with collaboration from New Harvest and GFI, they’ll be able to do just that.

How Now, No Cow: Animal-Free Dairy Startup PerfectDay Raises $24.7M

Someone’s moo-ving up in the world.

PerfectDay, a food startup developing technology to make animal-free milk, just raised $24.7 million in series A funding. This brings their total funding to $26.8 million. The round was led by Temasek, a Singapore state-owned investment company, with participation from Horizon Ventures, Iconiq Capital, and Lion Ventures, among others. Berkeley-based Perfect Day is on a roll: earlier this month, they received a patent to use their animal-free dairy technology in food applications.

Though it’s been attracting a good bit of attention as of late, PerfectDay has been around for a while. The company launched in 2014 under the name Muufri, but rebranded to PerfectDay in 2016. (Fun fact: The new name comes from a study which found that cows produced more milk when listening to soothing music like the eponymous Lou Reed tune.) They plan to use their new funding to expand their staff (currently 32 people strong) and accelerate commercial marketing of their product with dairy & food companies.

Unlike other milk alternatives, which are made of plants like soy, almond, or peas, PerfectDay uses fermentation to create the exact same elements found in cow’s milk. Scientists give genetically altered yeast a “blueprint” so that, when fed with certain nutrients, they produce two key proteins in milk: casein and whey.

The resulting proteins can be used to make lactose-free, gluten-free, soy-free, and nut-free milk. They can also be used to make a myriad of dairy products such as cheese, yogurt, and ice cream. While there are plenty of vegan dairy products already on shelves, no cashew cheese or coconut-based gelato will ever taste exactly the same as the dairy original. Products made with PerfectDay’s milk proteins, however, taste just like the “real thing”—after all, the proteins are genetically identical.

When they first launched, PerfectDay was trying to do two things: create a supply chain for animal-free dairy components and put a single brand of cow-free milk on supermarket shelves. In November of 2017 co-founder Perumal Gandhi announced on LinkedIn that they would shift course to focus on a B2B model, creating a supply chain for animal-free dairy products and partnering with food and drink companies to bring their technology to market.

And this, in my opinion, is where things start to get really interesting. “Nobody else was working on the supply chain side,” Gandhi told The Spoon. “We started this company to have the largest possible impact on the effects of animal agriculture on our planet, and now we can do that by working with grocery stores across multiple channels. We can be national from Day One.”

 

Animal-free milk has significantly lower environmental impact than cow’s milk.

By joining forces with existing food manufacturers, especially large dairy companies, PerfectDay hopes to alter the system from the inside. With the recent trends for vegan products and milk alternatives, this disruption could prove to be pretty profitable—both for PerfectDay and the planet. And given their investors’ connections with large-scale food and beverage brands, PerfectDay will likely be able to commercialize their “milk” protein technology relatively quickly.

Gandhi said that, while they’re also partnering with smaller, family-owned businesses, they need to team up with big companies to truly change the food industry. He hopes that their lab-grown casein and whey will eventually be like pea protein is today: an ingredient that used to be rare, but is now fairly commonplace in animal-free products.

The path ahead is not without obstacles. PerfectDay will have to convince consumers that cow-free dairy products can taste and function indistinguishably from traditional dairy, and can be produced at a competitive price. They will also have to figure out what their new products will be called.

In fact, the PerfectDay team is currently in talks with the FDA to determine what sort of labeling use for their cow-free dairy. Unlike lab-grown meat, which is fighting Big Beef to be able to use “meat” on their labels, Gandhi said that they want to call their product something other than “milk.” “We’re trying to come up with a nomenclature to show the consumer that this is produced in a new way, without animals,” he said. “If we call it milk then we’re not being transparent.” This makes sense, especially if their products are more expensive; people want to know why they’re paying a premium.

Challenges aside, their technology as a service model has the potential to be hugely successful. By choosing to use a B2B model, PerfectDay will no doubt be able to scale more quickly than with a B2C model. It will be interesting to follow their progress and see how they compare in, say, 5 years with other food tech startups who chose to market directly to consumers.

If the current trend towards animal protein alternatives continues, PerfectDay will no doubt take home some serious (cow-free) cheddar.