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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cultivated meat

The Spoon Weekly: David Chang Loves Food Tech, Cultivated Meat U, Amazon Fridge

This is the web version of the Spoon weekly newsletter where we wrap up of some of the most interesting stories in Food Tech. If you’d like to subscribe to The Spoon Newsletter, you can do so here.

David Chang Dives Into Food Tech

There may be no one with more culinary street cred in America today than David Chang. Not only has the New York-based chef won multiple James Beard awards and seen his restaurant Momofuku called the country’s most important restaurant, but Chang himself is widely recognized as an astute observer of the food world who always has his finger on the pulse of the country’s culinary zeitgeist.

And what’s on Chang’s mind these days is a whole lot of food tech, at least if his new series on Hulu, The Next Thing You Eat, is any indication. While the six-episode series isn’t available until October 21st, we do have the video preview, which features shots of everything from food delivery bots to lab-grown meat to indoor robotic farms, so we thought it would be fun to play a game of ‘guess who’ and see how many people and companies we can recognize from the food tech revolution. 

You can see the different food tech startups and leaders we identified on The Spoon. If you see any we missed, drop us a line.

The Spoon & CES Bring Food Tech To The World’s Biggest Tech Show

Exciting News: The Spoon is CES’s exclusive partner to bring food tech to the world’s biggest tech show!

Many remember the debut of the Impossible 2.0 burger in 2019, a watershed moment for both the company and the plant-based meat industry. There’s also been food robots, ice cream makers and much more that have made a big splash at the big show.

However, up until this year, any food professionals coming to CES were attending despite the lack of a dedicated food technology and innovation area in the exhibition space or in the conference tracks. Because CES is *the* great convener in the tech world, we felt food tech needed representation. This led The Spoon to rent out the ballroom of Treasure Island for a couple of years running to produce Food Tech Live. We wanted to give the food industry a central place to connect and check out the latest and greatest in food innovation.

But now that’s all about to change as food tech hits the big time this coming January. CES announced in June that food tech is going to be a featured theme for the first time ever at the big show. We couldn’t be more excited, in part because we will get to see even more cool food tech innovation, but also because CES has chosen The Spoon as the dedicated CES partner for the food tech exhibition and conference portions of the show!

Personally, this is a big deal as CES has been the one constant in my career as a journalist, analyst and entrepreneur, so I am very excited to help bring food tech to the big show!

Read my full post here with the news and, if you’d like to bring your food tech innovation to CES, let us know here.

We Called It: Amazon is Building a Smart Fridge

Amazon is building a smart fridge.

That’s at least according to a report from Business Insider, who reports that Amazon is building a fridge that would utilize machine vision and other advanced technology to monitor food in the refrigerator, notify us when it’s about to expire, and automatically order & replenish items through Amazon.

Dubbed Project Pulse, the initiative is being led by the company’s physical store unit, the same group that developed Amazon Go’s just walk out technology. Other teams, such as Lab 126 (its California-based hardware team that developed the Echo) and Amazon’s grocery unit are also contributing to the effort.

Here at The Spoon, we’re not all that surprised Amazon wants to create a fridge, mostly because we (I) predicted it nearly four years ago. When I asked “Is Amazon building a smart fridge?” in 2017, I tried to connect some of the dots I saw in Amazon’s commerce and devices businesses. And let me tell you, there were a lot of dots.Read more about why we suspected they were building a smart fridge at The Spoon.

Alt Protein

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

Last night, news broke of the USDA’s $10 million award to Tuft’s University to establish a 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.

This is a big deal. 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 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.  It’s about time since cultivated meat is a unique field unto itself which requires an educated and qualified workforce to power if it is to reach its full potential.

You can read the full story about the Tuft’s new Institute for Cellular Agriculture here.  

Revo Foods Wants To Build a 3D Printing Facility For Plant-Based Fish

Austrian startup Revo Foods produces plant-based fish products, but not the formed and fried items that are becoming increasingly common in grocery store aisles. Revo is making structurally sophisticated products: sheets of smoked salmon, salmon fillets, and sushi cuts with a realistic look and feel.

We’ve already seen cell-cultured meat startups use 3D printing to create cuts of meat with complex fat and tissue structures. Revo has brought 3D printing into the plant-based fish arena, and the company is betting that the resulting products will win over more seafood eaters.

See the full story here. 

Food Robots

Basil Street’s Pizza Robot Takes Flight With New Airport Rollout Deal

Basil Street, a maker of automated pizza vending machines, announced this week it has struck a deal with Prepango, a company that specializes in automated retail of food and beverage products in airports, to bring its pizza robot to airports across the US.

Launched this year, the Basil Street pizza smart vending machine – called Automated Pizza Kitchens (APK) – is roughly 20 square feet in size and holds up to 150 10-inch, thin-crust pizzas. When a customer places an order via the touchscreen or mobile app, the APK heats the flash-frozen pizza up using a non-microwave oven that cooks the pies in about three minutes.

Up until this point, the APK has been serving up pizzas in universities, business parks and corporate headquarters. That all changes in a couple weeks when the two companies bring the pizza bot to the San Antonio International Airport. From there, Basil Street and Prepango are eyeing launches of the APK in Chicago O’Hare International Airport, Cincinnati/North Kentucky International Airport, Indianapolis International Airport among others.

Read the full story here.

Flippy The Fast Food Robot Has Its Own National TV Commercial

Flippy’s about to hit the big time.

That’s because the fast food robot from Miso that’s in service in places like White Castle is going to be the focus of a new nationally televised commercial.

The ad opens with Flippy making fries in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant while a voiceover actor proclaims “Nothing hits the spot quite like good food, made fast.”

From there the 30 second spot toggles back and forth between a mother and daughter happily eating food and Flippy making fries back in the kitchen.

The voiceover continues: “The taste you grew up on, now made more consistent, more efficient, and dare we say, more delicous. Introducing Flippy, the world’s first AI kitchen assistant.”

The narrator brings the pitch home with the tag line, “Let the robots do the robotic work, so people can do the people work.”

To read the full story and see the Flippy commercial, click here. 

Restaurant Tech

Kitchen United Acquires Zuul: Has The Wave of Ghost Kitchen Consolidation Begun?

Ghost kitchen operator Kitchen United announced they had acquired Zuul, a ghost kitchen technology and consulting services company, for an undisclosed sum.

While this is one of the most significant acquisitions so far in the ghost kitchen space, it’s likely only the start of a wave of consolidation.

Even as funding still flows into the ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant space, many operators have realized that running an extensive network of multitenant kitchens is a capital-intensive business. Much of the recent funding in the broader ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant space has gone to companies that are creating platforms that make it easy for restaurant brands to launch new virtual brands through hosted kitchen models. While some companies, like Reef, continue down the heavy capex path powered by huge raises, venture and corporate capital has started to migrate towards hosted kitchen models and virtual restaurant brands that can take advantage of underutilized kitchen capacity in existing QSRs or independents.

Do you think the ghost kitchen space is going to see a wave of consolidation? Read the full piece at The Spoon and let us know what you think in the comments. 

PizzaHQ’s Founders Are Building a Robot-Powered Pizza Chain of the Future

Darryl Dueltgen and Jason Udrija had a choice: Expand their successful New Jersey pizza restaurant brand called Pizza Love, or start a tech-powered pizza concept that could change the pizza industry.

They decided to start a revolution.

“We’ve put a lot of time into building a labor-reduced, tech-driven concept that we believe will revolutionize the pizza industry,” said Udrija, who cofounded PizzaHQ alongside partners Dueltgen and Matt Bassil.

According to Udrija, PizzaHQ will utilize robotics and other technology to create a more affordable pizza (“almost a 50% lower price point”) while using the same recipe and high-quality ingredients of the pies made at their dine-in restaurant.

Once the pizza is boxed, it’s loaded into delivery vans and distributed to heated pickup lockers around Totowa, New Jersey, a borough about thirty minutes north of Newark. Customers will be able to track their delivery and will scan a QR code to pick up the pizza waiting for them in a locker. Third party delivery partners like UberEats will also be able to pick up orders from the pickup lockers and deliver to customers.

Read the full story about PizzaHQ and their pizza robot restaurant chain concept at The Spoon. 

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.

San Francisco Restaurant to Serve UPSIDE Foods’ Cultivated Chicken

Berkeley, California-based cultivated meat company UPSIDE Foods, announced today that it has partnered with Dominique Crenn, the co-owner and chef of the three Michelin-starred Atelier Crenn restaurant in San Francisco. Crenn will assist with recipe development for the company, and, pending regulatory review and approval, will serve UPSIDE’s cultivated chicken at her restaurant in the future.

Previously known as Memphis Meats, UPSIDE Foods unveiled its first cultivated meatball in 2016 and its first cultivated piece of poultry in 2017. This past May, the company announced that its first consumer-facing product will be cultivated chicken. However, none of UPSIDE’s wares are on sale yet, since the company has yet to gain regulatory approval to sell these and other cultivated meat products.

At the moment, Singapore is the only country that has approved the sale of cultivated meat, and it isn’t clear who will be the next. In the U.S., the FDA and USDA will oversee the regulation of cultured meat, and figuring out this framework is still a work in progress. As a result, UPSIDE’s restaurant partnership won’t come to fruition until the company gets regulatory approval to sell its cultivated meat.

If and when that happens, it will be a big switch for Crenn’s restaurant, too. Because of environmental concerns around the production of meat, Crenn made the decision to remove all meat from Crenn Dining Group’s restaurants in 2019. Since UPSIDE’s cultivated chicken is actual meat made from harvested animal cells, the restaurant group will be deviating from that stance for the first time in a few years. Of course, one of the benefits touted by cultured meat industry is that its products are more environmentally friendly than conventionally raised meat, since no animals are slaughtered in the process.

Putting cultured meat on a restaurant menu is one way to introduce it to consumers. Other food tech start-ups like Impossible Foods and Meati have presented their products through restaurants first, before going diectly to consumers. This is one way to garner interest from the innovators and early adopters who are eager to try new products.

After getting regulatory approval, UPSIDE Foods will continue to partner with other chefs and restaurants throughout the U.S. The company has begun building a production facility in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eventually plans to roll out its cultivated meat in grocery stores.

Report: Nestlé Is Getting Into Cultivated Meat Through Deal With Israel’s Future Meat

CPG giant Nestlé intends to enter the cultured meat market via a partnership with Israel-based alt-protein company Future Meat, according to a report from Bloomberg. 

Unnamed sources familiar with the matter said Nestlé is working on various products that mix its own plant-based proteins with cultivated meat from Future Meat. 

More granular details on the deal, such as specific products are not available at this time. Future Meat recently opened what it says is the world’s first production facility for cultured meat. The plant, located in Future Meat’s hometown of Rehovot, Israel, can produce 500 kilograms of cultured meat per day, or the equivalent to about 5,000 hamburgers, according to the company. The new facility is currently processing cultured chicken, pork, and lamb. Beef production is also in the works.

Future Meat’s end products will be a combination of cultivated and plant-based protein, which is exactly what Nestlé is aiming for in its deal with the company. Future Meat told the Spoon recently that its products are currently 45 to 75 percent cultured meat, with an edible scaffold made of plant protein.

Earlier this year, Future Meat told The Spoon it has been able to decrease the cost of cultured meat production by 1,000x over the last three years. At last check, the company had brought the cost of its cultured chicken breast down to $7.50 USD per quarter-pound serving. It followed that up with news that the production price could drop to $2 within the next 12 to 18 months.

Actual product launches for both Future Meat and Nestlé are contingent on the companies getting regulatory approvals. Currently, Future Meat is working to get regulatory approval here in the U.S., with the goal of selling its products in foodservice venues next year. A partnership with a major CPG like Nestlé may boost the company’s ambitions in this area.

Aleph Farms Raises $105M in Series B Funding

Cultivated meat company Aleph Farms announced today it has completed a $105 million Series B round of funding, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $118 million. The Series B round was led by L Catterton and DisruptAD with participation from Skyviews Life Science, Thai Union, BRF, and CJ CheilJedang. Existing investors VisVires New Protein, Strauss Group, Cargill, Peregrine Ventures, and CPT Capital also participated in the round.

Israel-based Aleph Farms said the new funds will go towards increasing manufacturing, growing operations internationally, and expanding product lines. Currently, the company is developing a cultivated beef steak and will unveil a prototype for that product in November at the Agri-Food Innovation Summit. 

There is of course an enormous difference between unveiling a prototype and making these whole-muscle cuts of cultivated meat at scale. One of the challenges for cultivated meat companies is being able to produce large quantities of product at a cost that is on par with traditional meat. Aleph Farms launched a new production process at the end of 2020 that will eventually be able to reach that price parity, according to the company.

The process is the first part of a phased build-out for Aleph’s forthcoming pilot production facility, which the company says will be operational by 2022. Aleph Farms also plans to do an initial market launch at that time. The Series B funding will, in bigger-picture terms, go towards helping the company realize that goal. 

Aleph’s announcement today follows recent news from other cultivated meat companies that are also opening pilot production facilities and also aiming for commercial launches in 2022. That includes MeaTech 3D, also based in Israel and also developing whole cuts of cultivated meat. Another Israeli company, Future Meat, has already opened its facility and says it plans to sell cultivated meat in the U.S. by 2022.

Before anyone sells anything, however, these companies must get regulatory approval for each market they want to enter. So far, just one company, Eat Just, has regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat, and that’s only in Singapore. Along with price parity, getting regulatory approval is a major topic in the cultivated meat conversation these days. 

Aleph Farms says it is working with regulatory agencies, though the company did not specify for which markets. Part of the company’s international expansion will be to the United Arab Emirates and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Aleph said it is also evaluating the possibility of a manufacturing facility located in the UAE.

MeaTech 3D Files a Patent for Printing More Cultivated Meat

Bioprinting startup MeaTech 3D has filed a patent with the United States Patent Office (USPTO) it says could significantly improve the manufacturing process for its cultivated meat.

The Ness Ziona, Israel-based company has since 2018 been developing a method for cultivated meat that relies on 3D bioprinting. Cells are extracted from the animal (without harming it) and transferred to bioreactors, where they multiply before getting differentiated into different cell types, such as fat and muscle. That process is, with some variation, akin to just about any company developing cultivated meat right now.

Where MeaTech’s method starts to differ is when the bio-inks come into play. The bio-inks are formed from the cell types mentioned above, like muscle and fat, and scaffolding material, which provides structural support cells can adhere to as they grow and mature. Once the inks are loaded into a 3D bioprinter, they are printed to, in MeaTech’s own description, “assemble cells as they would be found in a conventional cut of muscle.” The printed product is incubated to form tissue and eventually become a full cut of meat that goes to the consumer. 

Needless to say, nobody’s buying full cuts of steak from MeaTech on store shelves at the moment. The company has so far only printed a carpaccio-like layer of meat, which is considerably thinner than a ribeye-sized cut of meat. It will likely be years before the latter emerges as an actual product, though MeaTech has recently announced a pilot production facility that will help in this process.

The company’s main competitor in this area is Aleph Farms, also based in Israel. Earlier this year, Aleph said it had developed a 3D-printed ribeye cultivated steak. Elsewhere, however, many cultivated meat companies continue to focus on unstructured meat like grounds, nuggets, and patties.

MeaTech says the patent filed for this week will give the company more control during the printing process, increase printing speeds, and allow for a greater variety of inks. The end goal, of course, is to improve the manufacturing process overall in order to get the company closer to making whole cuts of meat. 

  

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Raises $170M, Brings Its Cultivated Meat to More Restaurants

Eat Just announced today that its GOOD Meat division has raised $170 million in new funding. The round included UBS O’Connor, Graphene Ventures, K3 Ventures, and others, and officially makes GOOD a subsidiary of Eat Just.

The company said today it plans to use the new funds to increase capacity of GOOD’s cultured meat production in addition to furthering research and development. 

Eat Just became the world’s first company to receive regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in December of 2020 in Singapore. It quickly followed that up with the actual sale of GOOD meat at the 1880 restaurant in the city-state. Since then, 1880 customers have continued to order GOOD’s cultivated chicken product at the restaurant, and can now even get it for delivery via foodpanda.  

With the new funds, Eat Just will expand the availability of GOOD’s cultivated meat from that single restaurant to another, the JW Marriott Singapore South Beach’s Madame Fan. Notably, the JW Marriott location has said it will outright replace its conventional chicken with GOOD’s cultivated version at certain times of the day. To start, GOOD meat will replace conventional chicken for delivery items ordered on Thursdays, starting May 20. GOOD will be available “for once-a-week dine-in starting soon.”

Eat Just CEO and founder Josh Tetrick has said before that he sees a world in which “restaurants remove conventional meat from their menu[s].” Eat Just’s plant-based egg products have already fully replaced their traditional counterparts at some restaurant chains, and more restaurants around the world are now exploring alternative protein as a regular staple on the menu.

For cultivated meat, the march into restaurants won’t happen overnight. Eat Just remains the only company in the world that can currently sell cultivated meat, and Singapore is still the only place in which the company can do that. However, other countries and companies are already in the process of granting and getting regulatory approval, which means in the next year or so, we’ll see more restaurant menus around the world debuting cultivated meat products.

MeaTech 3D Will Produce Cultivated Fat, Whole Steaks at Its Forthcoming Pilot Facility

Israeli bioprinting startup MeaTech 3D this week became the latest cultivated meat company to announce a pilot production facility, which the company intends to have operational in 2022. The plant’s location is yet to be announced. MeaTech said they will use the facility to increase the production of cultured chicken fat from Peace of Meat, a Belgian company MeaTech acquired in December of 2020. 

MeaTech says cultured fat can “significantly enhance” the texture, flavor, and mouthfeel of plant-based meat alternatives, giving them an altogether “meatier” taste than is available with current plant-based meat analogues. MeaTech said in this week’s announcement that it plans to license its cultivated fat tech — including cell lines and bioprocesses — to other companies wishing to improve their plant-based products.

However, cultivated fat is only one part of MeaTech’s overall plan. In tandem, the company will continue to develop a process for whole cuts of cultivated meat — namely steak and chicken breast — using 3D bioprinting tech.

Developing full cuts of cultivated meat is far more difficult than making minced products for burgers or chicken bites. With full cuts of meat, the various cells, including those for muscle, fat, blood vessels, and connective tissue, have to grow together, on scaffolding, to achieve the desired cut of meat. This is a significantly more intricate process than simply growing the different cells then manually combining them at the end, as can be done for a patty or nugget.

Aleph Farms, also based in Israel, is the other notable company attempting to produce whole cuts of cultivated meat. Earlier this year, the company said they had developed a 3D bioprinted Ribeye steak from cultivated protein.

So far, MeaTech has printed a carpaccio-like layer of meat. A full steak or chicken breast is in all likelihood years away. While the forthcoming pilot production facility will first be used to scale up production of Peace of Meat’s cultured fat, it will eventually incorporate MeaTech’s bioprinting tech to produce the aforementioned whole cuts of meat.

Food Tech Show Live: Sony Invests in our Robot Chef Future

The Spoon team recently got together on Clubhouse to talk about some of the most interesting food tech and future food stories of the week. This time around, we were also joined by food tech investor Brian Frank.

If you’d like to join us for the live recording, make sure to follow The Spoon’s Food Tech Live club on Clubhouse, where you’ll find us recording our weekly news review every Friday.

The stories we talked about this week include:

As always, you can find the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also download direct or just click play below.

Cultured Meat Startup Meatable Raises $47 Million Series A

Dutch cultured meat startup Meatable announced today that it has raised a $47 million Series A round of funding. Investors include Dr. Rick Klausner, Section 32, Dr. Jeffrey Leiden, and DSM Venturing, with participation from existing investors including BlueYard Capital, Agronomics, Humboldt, and Taavet Hinrikus. This brings Meatable’s total funding raised so far to $60 million.

Founded in 2018, Meatable’s technology allows it to grow meat from a single cell quickly, without the need for the controversial fetal bovine serum. As we wrote back in 2019:

They do this by using pluripotent stem cells, which can proliferate faster than regular stem cells and are malleable, meaning they can be coaxed to turn into any type of animal cell (muscle, fat, etc). Meatable claims that with its unique technology it can make large batches of animal tissue cells in a matter of days to weeks, whereas most companies need months.

All that speed comes at a cost, however. Meatable told TechCrunch that its meat currently costs $10,000 per pound. Obviously a price that high is untenable, but thankfully, there are a number of startups around the world working to bring the price of cultured meat down through various methods. In Israel, Future Meat announced this year that it has brought the price of its chicken down to $7.50 per quarter pound, a big milestone in the industry. If current industry predictions hold true, cultured meat could reach price parity with animal meat in five years.

Meatable’s funding continues the funding hot streak for cultured meat startups in 2021. Other cultured meat companies that have received funding rounds so far this year include BlueNalu, CellulaREvolution, and fellow Dutch startup Mosa Meat.

Meatable says that it will use its new funds to advance small scale production at the Biotech Campus Delft and diversify its product lineup.

Mirai Foods Expands Seed Round to €3.7M for Its Cultivated Meat

Swiss cultured meat startup Mirai Foods has expanded its Seed funding by an additional €1.8 million (~$2.15 million USD), bringing the total round to to €3.7 million (~$4.41 million USD), according to a story today in EU-Startups. Investors in the Seed round include German Family Office FRIBA Investment, Skyviews Life Science, investor Ulf Claesson, company Paulig through its PINC venture arm PINC, and Team Europe.

Mirai says that it’s the only cultivated meat startup in Switzerland. EU-Startups writes that the company’s culturing process does not use genetic modification, and that its products are being developed with EU market preferences in mind. The company had previously announced its smaller seed round at the end of January.

It’s actually not that surprising that Mirai expanded its Seed round. There has been a flurry of funding activity in the cultured meat space since the start of the year. Korean startup, CellMEAT raised $4.5 million. Israel’s Future Meat raised $26.75 million. The U.K.’s CellulaREvolution raised $1.37 million. Even Mosa Meat expanded it’s initial Series B round with an additional $10 million in February.

Given all of these players (and more!) developing their own takes on cultured meat, it makes sense that Mirai would want to bulk up its own warchest to better compete. All these different approaches to creating cultured meat are also leading to breakthroughs and dramatic reductions in prices. Some experts predict that cultured meat could reach price parity with animal-based meat in as little as five years. As such, it’s not shocking that more investors are interested in funding an early stage cultured meat startup like Mirai.

Mirai said it will use the funds to grow its headcount, bolster its lab and build a pilot production lab.