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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

clean meat

Shiok Meats is The First Cell-Based Meat Company in Southeast Asia

If you’ve been on the internet in the past, oh, year or so, you’ve probably heard some media buzz about cell-based meat: animal tissue produced outside of an animal. But the pool of companies working in this space is actually pretty small in terms of product and geography.

Cellular aquacultured startup Shiok Meats is pushing the industry envelope on both accounts. Firstly, they’re developing ways to make cell-based crustaceans. Companies are working on ground beef, steak, pork sausages, salmon, and tuna — but as far as I’ve heard (and granted, some companies are in stealth mode), Shiok is the first to tackle crab, lobster, and shrimp.

When I spoke with Shiok Meats CEO and co-founder Dr. Sandhya Sriram, my first question was about texture. Replicating meat’s texture is one of the biggest challenges for cellular agriculture/aquaculture companies, and crustaceans in particular have a toothsome bite that seems like it would be much harder to copy than, say, ground beef or processed pork sausage. But Sriram is undaunted. “Yes, the technology and science are different [than other clean meat companies,] but we all have similar challenges,” she told me. They also won’t be trying to make the shell, which keeps things simpler. And with new innovations continuously being developed to facilitate cell growth, such as edible scaffolds, perhaps Shiok’s relatively late entrance will serve them well.

The fact that I could eventually taste a cell-based lobster roll is certainly exciting, but what’s more notable about Shiok Meats is its location. The startup is based in Singapore, which makes it, according to Sriram, the first cell-based meat company in Southeast Asia.

This is huge. Asia is the largest meat producer in the world, making 40-50 percent of the world’s meat. From a consumption perspective, there’s expected to be a 78 percent increase in demand for meat and seafood by year 2050. Yet the vast majority of cultured meat companies are based in the U.S. or, across the Atlantic, in the U.K. and Israel. (The notable exception is Shojinmeat, a Japanese company open sourcing clean meat production.) It makes sense that a company is bringing cell-based meat, which some herald as the solution to the evils of industrial meat consumption, to one of the regions where it could make the biggest impact.

But the choice to operate out of Singapore brings plenty of challenges. At the Alternative Protein Show this week in San Francisco, Sriram spoke about the differences between operating a cell-based meat company in the U.S. vs. Asia. Cultured meat companies in the U.S. have more access to funding and infrastructure than they would in Asia, and American and European consumers are more amenable to the concept of meat grown outside the animal.

Sriram told me that they expect to bring their first product to market in 3-5 years, with a taste test happening in the next year in high-end restaurants. Their target market is Asia-Pacific, so they’ll start rolling out products in Singapore, Hong Kong, and India, then eventually move onto Australia. Eventually, Shiok will sell their cell-based crustaceans to food companies who will incorporate their products into frozen meals.

For now, Shiok Meats is still in the R&D phase. They’ve developed a media (food which helps the animal cells grow) made of synthetic and plant-based substances, so they don’t have to use the very contentious Fetal Bovine Serum. They just closed their pre-seed round for an undisclosed amount and are working on raising a seed round over the next few months.

Currently, Shiok Meats just staffed by Sriram and her co-founder Ka Yi Ling. Compared to “veteran” cell-based meat companies like Memphis Meats, which was founded in 2015, the startup is small, young, and untested. But because of its location, Shiok Meats has the potential to make a global impact that could far outweigh cultured meat companies in the U.S. and Europe.

Video: Plant-Based, Cellular, and Sustainable — What is the Future of Meat?

Cell-based meat (also known as “clean” and “lab-grown” meat) is set to hit the market by the end of 2018, even though the FDA and USDA are still figuring out how to regulate it. At the same time, plant-based meat companies are seeing unprecedented levels of consumer interest and investment, even from Big Meat companies.

Watch as our panel from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, featuring Tom Mastrobuoni of Tyson Ventures, Christie Lagally of Seattle Food Tech, and Thomas Bowman of JUST, Inc., explores the challenges and opportunities of the future of meat: plant-based, cell-based, and otherwise.

Plant-Based, Cellular & Sustainable: Exploring The Future of Meat

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.

Food Tech News Roundup: Big Moves in Alterna-Meats and Army Pizza

Boy oh boy, what a week for news! In addition to the new product launches at the Amazon Event (hi, Alexa-powered microwave), InstantPot also came up with a blender that blends hot and cold, and a new law passed which will allow Californians to sell home-cooked meals.

But there were quite a few other food tech-y stories that caught our eye this week, from the first cell-based pork tasting to a pizza with a three-year (!) shelf life. Start off your weekend by catching up on the latest:

 

JUST Inc. debuts sustainable food accelerator to tackle Asian market
Plant-based food company JUST Inc. announced plans this week to launch Made JUST, a “first-of-its-kind approach to bring sustainable and functional tools from the plant and animal kingdoms to the world’s brightest entrepreneurs.” For their first iteration, the startup teamed up with global venture accelerator Brinc and plans to tackle the Asian market. Each chosen company will receive $500,000 HKD (~$64,000 USD), as well as mentorship opportunities, access to Asian consumers, and access to JUST’s discovery pipeline. Any goods that come out of the platform will have a “Made JUST” logo.

 

Photo: OBRC.

Oregon launches America’s first statewide refillable bottle system
The Oregon Beverage Recycling Group (OBRC) has developed a new bottle that can be refilled up to 40 times. The bottles are made chiefly out of recycled glass and have a unique barcode that distinguishes them from other, non-refillable bottles. With their statewide infrastructure for bottle collection, the OBRC can find bottles that have been thrown in the recycling and return them to breweries for refilling.

 

Photo: U.S. Army

The Army has developed a pizza M.R.E.
M.R.E.’s (or Meals Ready to Eat) are meals that are long-lasting and require no cooking, making them ideal for combat missions or extreme temperatures. Generally, they’re pretty unappetizing — but recently the U.S. Army came out with an M.R.E. (soon to be deployed) featuring a food that nobody doesn’t love: pizza. The new Sicilian-style slice has cheese, tomato sauce, and pepperoni bits, and stays good for at least 36 months. 

 

Photo: Field Roast

Danone & co. form plant-based food lobby in Canada
This week Danone, Hain Celestial, Ripple Foods, Field Roast, and other plant-based producers teamed up to form a lobbying organization called Plant-Based Foods of Canada (PBFA). PBFA’s aim is to protect the market and regulatory interests of plant-based food companies in the Great North. This comes around the same time the FDA and USDA are tackling issues of labeling for plant-based milks and cell-based meat; Canada clearly wants to make sure its alterna-meats have the right to market themselves in the ways in which they see fit.

 

Photo: New Age Meats

New Age Meats does world’s first cell-based pork taste test
This past Monday cell-based meat startup New Age Meats invited journalists to a San Francisco brewery for the world’s first taste test of cultured pork. Co-founders Brian Spears and Andra Necula teamed up with chef/butcher Matt Murphy to turn their lab-grown pork muscle and fat tissue into sausages (with a vegan casing, of course). Business Insider’s Erin Brodwin got to taste the slaughter-free sausages, and had this to say:

The flavor was smoky and savory. The texture was distinctly sausage-like. It tasted like meat. Then again, it is meat.

This test was an exciting landmark in the march to bring cell-based meat to market. There have been taste tests of cultured duck and beef, but never pork — by harnessing automation and data, Indie Bio-backed New Age Meats hopes to have their product on the market in a couple of years.

Did we miss any stories? Send us a tip!

A Plant-Based Tour of What I Ate at the Good Food Conference

You don’t attend the Good Food Conference (GFC) for the food. You go there to hear the Big Guns of the meat alternatives movement — like Seth Goldman of Beyond Meat, Mark Post of Mosa Meats, and Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats — speak onstage. You go there to watch new startups pitch their company’s vision for reducing (and eliminating) industrial meat production. You go there to hear about the latest breakthroughs and challenges in the plant- and cell-based meat spaces.

But at the same time, you kind of do go for the food. Because the whole point of the conference is to promote alternatives to traditional meat — and in order to be successful, the first thing those alternatives have to do is taste good. Like, good enough that a carnivore would choose them over a burger or hot dog.

As cell-based meat isn’t to market yet, all the alterna-meats from the two-day conference were plant-based. Here’s a brief overview of all the ones I tried:

Photo: Veggie Grill.

Breakfast

The Good Food Conference fueled their first-day attendees with a breakfast burrito featuring JUST Egg, a vegan egg replacement made of mung beans. The resulting scramble is yellowish and color and, while the texture is pretty spot-on, still has an unmistakeable beaniness. However, camouflaged in a tortilla with black beans, roasted potatoes, and spicy salsa, said beaniness was pretty well concealed.

Sadly I didn’t take a picture of this since I just grabbed one to eat while watching the opening panels, but the photo from Veggie Grill, who teamed up with JUST to launch an all-day breakfast burrito featuring the scramble, is pretty similar. While I think JUST Egg still has a ways to go before it fools any egg-lovers out there, it’s still a reasonable stand-in for huevos when combined with other, stronger flavors, like salsa, peppers, and cheese (vegan or otherwise).

The Beyond Meat spread.

Lunch

Beyond Meat provided the lunch for Day 1, and boy did they do it right. Their grilled sausages (in Bratwurst and Italian flavors) accompanied corn with vegan aioli, as well as several salads. I got a “bratwurst” and really enjoyed it; the sausage had a nice snap and the interior texture was realistically sausage-like. The flavor was also super heavy on the umami, without tasting overly of soy. Overall, two thumbs up.

Photo: JUST

Snack

To combat that afternoon lull, I had an individual serving of JUST cookie dough, which comes in a nifty plastic container with a detachable spoon built into the top. The two flavors I tried were birthday cake, which was overly sweet with sprinkles, and chocolate chip, which tasted just like Tollhouse. (That’s a good thing.)

Overall it’s not that hard to make good-tasting vegan cookie dough — I’ve done it at home with just a few simple substitutions — but the individual serving packages are pretty genius. Now you can get a sugary snack on the go without worrying about salmonella from raw eggs — and they know just the shade of millennial pink to use to draw in customers.

Day 2

Breakfast

Day 2’s breakfast was courtesy of MorningStar Farms, but all I saw were bagels, granola (with almond milk!), and fruit. Not that I’m complaining. I did have a latté made with Oatley oat milk however, which I thought was pretty darn delicious.

Oat milk is definitely the next non-dairy milk trend, at least when it comes to coffee: it doesn’t separate as easily as almond milk and froths much better than soy, meaning your barista can make fancy latté art with it. Oats also require far less water to grow than almonds, so it’s comparatively sustainable, and also doesn’t affect those with nut or soy allergies.

Photo by Nick Klein for The Good Food Institute.

Lunch

For lunch on Day 2 we had Impossible Burgers. Which, after the awesome Beyond sausage the day before, were fine but a little lackluster. They were super savory and tasted mainly of soy, and I kept thinking there was a fishy flavor in there — though that could be attributed to the mishmash of toppings I layered on the patty.

However, the burger was cooked medium, meaning I could see a little bit of the heme-powered “bleeding” action. Overall I would have gone with a smaller bun or thicker patty (or maybe White Castle-esque slider!) so the burger didn’t get lost under everything else.

 

Snack

Visually, this snack spread was one of the most trompe l’oeuil meat-like of the entire weekend. Provided by Worthington, a meat alternative food company, there were “chicken” nuggets and even a vegan charcuterie plate with plant-based bologna. Both tasted primarily of soy, but I liked them — especially the nugget, which had the semi-spongy trademark chicken nugget texture nailed to a T.

 

Photo: Good Catch Foods.

What I Didn’t Eat:

I missed the fish-free tuna sushi from Ocean Hugger foods (made of tomatoes!) and the plant-based tuna salad from Good Catch Foods. I also didn’t get to try Morningstar Farms’ “meat lover” vegan burger, which is clearly trying to capitalize off the buzz around the meat-like patties from Beyond Burger and Impossible Foods. Next year.

 

Conclusions:

Overall, a lot of things tasted pretty heavily of soy, reminding me of veggie breakfast sausages and “soy”-rizo products I’ve eaten in my five years of vegetarianism. The food items that really impressed me were the Beyond Sausage, whose texture was spot-on, and the look of the Worthington charcuterie. I’m sure at next year’s summit there will be even more alterna-meats, milks, and eggs, from even more new, hungry young companies. I can’t wait to try them all.

Clean Meat Is Out — Cell-Based Meat is In

One of the biggest news stories from last week’s Good Food Conference (GFC) happened after all the speakers had left the stage. Over email, Brian Spears, the CEO and co-founder of cellular agriculture company New Age Meats, told me that:

1-2 reps of all the existing “clean meat” companies, except for just a few, met on Friday after the Good Food Conference. We decided that, for the purposes of working with traditional meat companies and US regulators, we are abandoning the term clean meat in favor of cell-based meat. We also decided to form an industry trade association.

Now, this is not the first time that clean meat (also known as in-vitro, lab-grown, and cultured meat) has rebranded. But unlike previous name switches, which were mostly working to quiet public fears and make meat grown in a lab environment sound palatable, this new term is targeting traditional meat companies and U.S. regulators.

In recent months, the question of what to call cultured meat has stirred up some serious controversy with both parties. A coalition of big meat production groups penned a letter to President Trump, asking for equal regulation for cell-based and traditional meat. A few months ago the FDA had a public meeting to open dialogue about regulation, terminology, and safety of cultured meat technology, and most recently a Missouri law went into effect which only allows food “derived from harvested production livestock or poultry” to be called “meat.”

By rebranding as “cell-based meat,” these companies are hoping to walk a fine line that will appease both consumers and the governing bodies who will eventually regulate food produced through cellular agriculture. “Cell-based meat” is certainly more revealing than “clean meat,” which, while it sounds nice, doesn’t exactly reveal why it’s clean.

That term is also pretty passive aggressive towards traditional meat companies. “Clean” implies that the alternative — that is, meat from slaughtered animals — is dirty. And if you compare the pristine lab environment in which cultured meat is made to a slaughterhouse, it certainly is cleaner. But that terminology is already ruffling lots of feathers in Big Meat, who are responding by writing letters and pushing laws to block “clean meat” from calling itself meat at all.

Honestly, I’m torn on whether the name change is a good idea — or even necessary. If cultured meat is as safe as its producers say (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be), it will eventually get regulatory approval and make its way to market — no matter what it’s called. To me, the bigger issue around naming is consumer acceptance. My guess is that people would gravitate to something called “clean” meat more readily than the comparatively clinical “cell-based” meat. But all that will lie with the marketing team, and right now most cultured meat companies are made up chiefly of scientists.

During the GFC, I was also struck by a point made by Barb Stuckey, President and Chief Innovation Officer at Mattson. She said: “I don’t know if what we call clean meat matters as much as what these companies do with their marketing. My family doesn’t think of Impossible burgers as “veggie burgers,” they’re just Impossible Burgers.” Maybe terminology won’t matter at all, and instead of asking for a “clean” or “cell-based” burger in 10 years, people will request a “Memphis” or a “Mosa.”

Though the number of cell-based meat companies is growing, there are still relatively few — only 27, was the number given at the GFC. A group that small can be agile, as long as they’re all on the same page. It wouldn’t surprise me if we see another rebrand, either for regulatory or consumer acceptance purposes, over the next few years.

If you’re curious about how plant- and cell-based meat will disrupt the consumer meal journey, join us at the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th for our Future of Meat panel featuring innovators from Seattle Food Tech, JUST, and more. Get your tickets before they sell out!

SKS Japan: Excitement, Growth & a Rapidly Maturing Food Tech Ecosystem

Last week I was in Tokyo for Smart Kitchen Summit Japan. It was the second edition of our Japanese event, and while it’s only been twelve short months since that first gathering, the amount of progress I witnessed in the Japan food tech scene over the course of the two days in Tokyo was amazing.

Here are some of the trends, products and innovators that stood out to me last week:

In Japan, Much of the Innovation Comes From Big Companies

For those familiar with Japan, you’ll know it’s not surprising that much of the innovation comes from within established companies. These “intreprenuers” often work in R&D or as part of new business units specifically to innovate new product concepts.

One of these innovation units is Panasonic’s GameChanger Catapult. We’ve written about Catapult as they’ve been showing off innovative product concepts like a food softener for the elderly or home fermentation system.  As it turns out, the innovation unit from Panasonic is still working on those ideas as well as a few new ones.

One of Catapult’s product concepts is Tottemeal, which first showed up at SXSW in Austin in March 2017 as a product concept called Bento@YourOffice. It was comprised of an IoT-powered smart fridge and app system, which is similar in concept to Byte Fridge in that both offer fresh food for sale. Since SXSW last year the company has approached partners and refined the concept to work with any fridge.  The company is now testing out the service in Panasonic’s event/innovation hub, Kura-Think, in Tokyo.

Another large company that’s been busy working on future-forward food tech concepts since last year’s SKS Japan is CookPad. The digital cooking site, which boasts 100 million users worldwide, introduced a smart kitchen platform a couple months ago called OiCy that connects their recipes with appliances to create a guided cooking platform. At SKS Japan, the company outlined the future vision for OiCy in the form of a six-level roadmap for the smart kitchen platform. They also announced an updated partner list which includes hardware manufacturers such as Sharp and Hitachi.

Japan’s Startup Ecosystem Is Gaining Momentum

While much of Japan’s innovation comes from within large organizations, there are also signs of a rapidly maturing food tech startup ecosystem.  Part of the growth is being driven by Japan’s bigger companies like Kirin (who launched their own accelerator). However, there were also a number of young and innovative entrepreneurs that spoke at SKS Japan such as Integriculture’s Yuki Hanyu and Open Meals’ Ryosuke Sakaki.

We’ve written about both companies before in the Spoon. Chris Albrecht was the first to write about Integriculture’s impending $2.7 million funding round when he covered Shojinmeat, the open source project from Hanyu. As Northeast Asia’s only lab-grown meat startup, CEO Hanyu has big plans to jumpstart alternative meat production in the Asia market, and discussed his plans for doing just that.

Open Meals made a big splash this March at SXSW with their sushi teleportation demo. While true food teleportation may be a ways off, the Open Meals vision of creating a food digitization and printing framework is pretty fascinating. Company CEO Sasaki presented an ambitious 100-year look into the future for the idea around food digitization that spanned from digitized food restaurants in Tokyo in just two years and eventually sees space colonies where we’re sharing food experiences in real time with people on earth.

Dinner time in space

Japan’s Smart Kitchen Community Embraces Ideas From US & Europe

The Japan smart kitchen/food tech community is also really interested in innovation happening from the West. One of the speakers at SKS Japan this year was Jon Jenkins, the head of product for the guided cooking group within Meyer, Hestan Cue. Jenkins, who goes by JJ, gave a talk about the role of technology and software in the kitchen and later gave a hands-on demo of the product to a capacity crowd:

It wasn’t just cooking demos. A highly engaged audience packed the room to hear conversations with innovators from the US and Europe such as Jason Cohen of Analytical Flavor Systems talk about the impact on AI on food personalization and flavor. They also heard from Suvie’s Robin Liss as she discuss her company’s four-chamber cooking robot and how today’s appliance companies need to start innovating around food services. The Future Food Institute’s Sara Roversi talked about taking her food innovation platform, which she started in Europe, across the globe. They also listened to Amar Krishna of Chefling and Kevin Yu of SideChef discuss the differences between the smart kitchen platform market in the US with CookPad’s Tad Yoshioka.

Collaboration, Innovation & Community

The biggest takeaway for me from this year’s SKS Japan was there a growing sense of collaboration, innovation, and community in Japan’s food tech market.  Part of it was the hard work of our partners for SKS Japan, SigmaXYZ, who have done a great job over the past year fostering the SKS community. But, just as with the US and Europe, it’s clear now that the Japanese market was ready for an event to catalyze innovation and to bring it together, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that event is SKS.

I’m excited to see how our event in Japan has just done that and has become the go-to food tech event in the Japan market and for much of Asia and I can’t wait to go back next year. I hope I’ll see you there.

If you’re interested in being a part of our global community, don’t miss SKS in Seattle in less than two months!  Robin Liss, Jon Jenkins, Jason Cohen and many more will be there, so you will not want to miss out. You can check it out here and don’t forget to use discount code SPOON for 25% off tickets!

“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.

Shojinmeat Scores Grant for Open Source Clean Meat Initiative

Last week Shojinmeat announced on Twitter that it had received a flash grant from the Shuttleworth Foundation. Shojinmeat was nominated for the $5,000 grant by Isha Datar, a Shuttleworth Fellow and the Executive Director of cellular agriculture non-profit New Harvest.

If you’re not familiar, Chris Albrecht covered Tokyo-based Shojinmeat a few months ago for the Spoon:

“Shojinmeat is now an active Slack channel that connects roughly 30 DIY citizen scientists from across Japan. They gather to talk about their homegrown meat experiments and related topics such as tissue engineering, animal welfare, and regenerative medicine. Shojinmeat has also put out ‘zines with articles and pictures about their work, and recently made a move to the West by creating an English-speaking Slack channel.”

Essentially, Shojinmeat is an informational platform for DIY clean meat enthusiasts — more like a club than an actual company. So it’s easy to see why the Shuttleworth Foundation, who supports open knowledge resources, would want to support them.

Shojinmeat isn’t founder Yuki Hanyu’s only project. He also created Integriculture; a startup which is making clean meat infrastructure for B2B sale. On our call Hanyu said that Integriculture is gearing up for their first product launch this fall: a food-grade culture media, which is the “food” which clean meat needs to grow. This plant-based media is composed of sugars, amino acids, and vitamins, and Hanyu said he anticipates customers will range from companies to biohackers.

Clearly, Hanyu and his team have their fingers in quite a few pies. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. (Apologies for the mixed metaphors.) Shojinmeat is also developing incubators for their members to “grow” their own cultured meats. He’s planning to launch these incubators, which will market for roughly $100, at COMITIA125, a manga event in Tokyo, on August 18th. (See top image for a look at the incubator, which will be distributed with a clean meat ‘zine detailing how it can be used to grow animal tissue.) Afterwards, he’ll make them available online and put the blueprint on open source development platform GitHub.

Hanyu told me that they would use the money to buy new equipment for DIY clean meat research and fund travel to biohacking conferences, so they could share their message to a wider audience.

Interestingly, he also mentioned that Shojinmeat would also use the grant to support a project they’re working on with local high schools. Hanyu is collaborating with a group of government officials (among others) to launch a high school class focused entirely on cell cultures.

Clean meat has sparked quite a bit of controversy as of late. With the government and groups like the National Beef Cattleman’s Association attempting to exert influence over and regulate the clean meat space, a virtual army of people working on affordable, attainable solutions around the world (or at least in Japan) is pretty cool. It’s also a sign that the steady march towards cultured meat can’t be stopped.

The Shuttleworth Foundation website says it awards Flash Grants to companies that are “social change agents.” There’s no question that Shojinmeat — with its mission to make cultured meat open and accessible — is exactly that.

Higher Steaks is Developing Cultured Pork for the Masses

When it rains, it pours. In 2013 Dr. Mark Post made the first ever lab-grown burger, and five years later cultured meat (also known as lab-grown or clean meat) seems to be everywhere you turn. It’s the subject of global conferences and pleas to President Trump, and there are more startups in the field every day.

Which means that people are buzzing about which company will be the first to bring cultured meat to market. Higher Steaks, the London-based startup founded in early 2018 by Benjamina Bollag and Dr. Stephanie Wallis, isn’t trying to produce a marketable clean meat product before anyone else. Instead, their focus is on making it super scalable.

To do that, they’re working to find a way to make cultured animal tissue quickly and affordably. “We’re making sure all of our innovation is working towards making the process industrial-sized,” said Bollag. Specifically, as with most cellular agriculture companies, they’re working towards optimizing production and reducing cost.

This is where the co-founders’ skill sets will come in handy. Bollag studied chemical engineering at Imperial College London before launching her own retail company. She stumbled on the concept of clean meat while part of a cohort for Entrepreneur First in London and soon afterwards met and teamed up with Wallis, who has degrees in neuroscience and stem cell regeneration. They also have help from David Hay, the Chair of Tissue Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. Together, they hope they have the scientific expertise and business strategy needed to make it in the emerging (and competitive) clean meat industry.

Originally, Higher Steaks was planning to develop a cultured foie gras as their first product to market, but decided to switch to pork. “We moved from niche to more broad,” said Bollag. Here is where Wallis’ experience in pluripotent stem cells, which can morph to become any type of cell, is critical: “Pig is the most similar to humans,” she said. “The processes that you use to create these cells from humans are more likely to be successful when you’re using pigs than other animals.”

This is helpful because there’s quite a lot of medical research (and funding) around growing human tissue through stem cell engineering, specifically for organ replacements. The theory is that this technology will apply more easily to pork, which is similar to human tissue, than it would to, say, duck or venison.

The founders of Higher Steaks told me that their first product would probably be ground pork, maybe sausage. Optimistically, they’re hoping to bring it to market by 2021 — which includes about a year and a half waiting period for food safety approval. This timing is in line with other clean meat companies like Memphis Meats and Mosa Meat.

Higher Steaks’ choice to focus on pork is unique. JUST, who claims they’ll bring a cultured meat product to company by the end of this year, is working on poultry, as is Iraeli startup Supermeat. Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms are focusing on beef. Memphis Meats made a cultured pork meatball as a proof of concept in 2016, but has since shifted its work to chiefly poultry. If Higher Steaks succeeds in creating scalable lab-grown pork, they could take a huge bite out of the meat market — not just in Europe, but globally.

Bollag recognizes the global implications of cultured meat technology. She took the podium at the FDA meeting on cultured meat earlier this month to speak about regulating this new food. When I called her to debrief about the meeting, she emphasized the need for collaboration between regulatory bodies and cellular agriculture startups around the world. “We’re global companies, and the safety standards need to be global, too.”

Once Higher Steaks and the other cellular agriculture startups racing towards making clean meat scalable and affordable can reach their goal, that is.

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.

Finless Foods Raises $3.5 Million for Cultured Bluefin Tuna

Today cultured seafood company Finless Foods CEO & Co-founder Mike Selden wrote a piece on Medium announcing that they had closed a $3.5 million seed round. The round was led by Draper Associates, with participation from Softmatter VC, Blue Horizon, Hemisphere Ventures, Yakumi Investment and more.

In the piece, Selden wrote that this invesment would bring them “to the end of our initial R&D phase,” and give them “the tools necessary to move into production pending the closing of a Series A.”

Finless Foods uses cellular biology to grow fish (and, eventually, other seafood) in bioreactors. They’re doing similar work to Memphis Meats or JUST Foods, but are focused on fish instead of meat. Wild Type is another startup using cellular agriculture to develop seafood (specifically salmon) grown outside the animal, and similarly raised $3.5 million a few months ago.

The company got its start in the legendary IndieBio accelerator program in 2017, where they created the first fish product grown in a lab. They later got investment from Hatch, a Norwegian aquaculture accelerator, as well as Hi-Food, an Italian company focused on sustainability in food.

Their first product will be bluefin tuna, a species which is threatened with overfishing. They plan to bring it to market by the end of 2019 — and with this funding, they just got a lot closer to that goal.

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.