Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cultivated meat

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

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

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

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

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


All eyes on cell culture media

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

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

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

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

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

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


Collaborating to solve key questions

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

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

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

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


Securing public funding

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

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

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

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


Introducing cell-cultivated products to the public

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

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

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

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

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


Moving toward semi-industrialization

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

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

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

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

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

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

GOOD Meat Receives Approval in Singapore to Use Serum-Free Media for Cultivated Meat Production

GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat division of Eat Just, announced today that it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) for the use of serum-free media for the production of cultivated meat.

Many in the industry believe that using animal-free growth media will not only help the cultivated meat industry achieve what is effectively its raison d’être through the severing of reliance on a cruel animal agriculture industry, but it will also lead to greater scalability, lower manufacturing costs, and a more sustainable product. It also paves the way for the production of larger quantities of real chicken made from cells.

GOOD Meat had previously obtained approval from SFA for its first chicken product in November 2020, and subsequent approval for new formats of its poultry in November 2021. With the latest regulatory approval for serum-free cultivation media, Eat Just says its cell ag meat division will soon transition to a more efficient and favorable production process.

According to the company, its chicken has been featured on menus at restaurants, in hawker stalls, and via food delivery. And now, beginning this month, diners can reserve weekly tables to try out Good Meat’s cultivated chicken at Huber’s Butchery, a Singaporean producer and supplier of meat products.

The company is also working on a Singapore production facility with production partner ABEC. According to Good Meat, the new facility will hold the largest bioreactor in the cultivated meat industry and will be able to use the serum-free production process for its cultivated meat when it opens next year.

“Not too long ago, observers thought removing serum was a major limiting step to scaling cultivated meat,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just. “I could not be prouder of our team for doing just that and receiving approval to commercialize it this week. It’s yet another step forward for our company, the cultivated meat industry, and the health of our planet.”

This week has been a big one for animal-free growth media. On Monday, Multus announced they had raised $9.5 million to fund the production of a growth media production plant. And yesterday, cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat announced they had been able to grow cultivated fat without fetal-bovine serum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

With $5.2M in New Funding, Forsea Forgoes Scaffolding in Attempt to Create Faster Path to Cultivated Meat

Cultivated meat, meet the organoid.

The rapid advance of technology used to create these small, three-dimensional collections of cells grown outside of a living being has created excitement over the past decade-plus in the medical research community, but now a startup named Foresea wants to use organoid technology not to save human lives, but instead that of eels and other seafood. The Israel-based startup, which today announced $5.2 million in seed funding according to a release sent to The Spoon, has developed a technology that utilizes organoids grown in bioreactors to produce eel meat.

According to the company, using organoids allows it to bypass the use of scaffolding, the technology typically used in cultivated meat creation to give meat its structure and texture. Forsea also claims that its technology can grow cultivated meat with fewer bioreactors as well as significantly less growth factors than is typically used in the cultivated meat creation process.

“While cell cultivation largely focuses on a system of directed differentiation, where cells are signaled to differentiate into a specific cell type and are then combined on a scaffold, our system grows the aggregate of the various cells already at the initial stage of the process,” Iftach Nachman, a cofounder of Foresea and inventor of the technology, explained. “The cells organize themselves autonomously into their innate, purposed structure, just as in nature.”

Forsea makes a point in their announcement that their technology creates standalone organisms utilizing an ex vivo methodology. This means that unlike in vitro (which literally translates to “in glass”) approaches where cells are isolated and separated from their natural biological surroundings, Foresea’s organoids are taken from living organisms and grown with minimal alteration from their natural conditions.

Forsea’s is one among a string of announcements over the past year focused on producing proteins at lower cost and with higher efficiency. Whether through new hybrid techniques, lower-cost growth factors, or new approaches to infrastructure, the cultivated meat industry’s focus has shifted beyond proving bench-scale viability to creating scalable solutions for mass-market production. With the introduction of the organoid as a platform for cultivated meat, Forsea has put an intriguing new approach on our watch list for the future of food.

SuperMeat Believes An Open Source Approach to Cultivated Meat Will Benefit All

Lab-grown or cultured meat is a sexy topic that fulfills the dream of healthy eating while saving the planet’s precious resources. Most of the headlines focus on the companies in the four corners of the world waiting for regulators to wave the checkered flag. The more interesting story—at least for those who enjoy looking under the hood—is in the processes, supply chain, and partnerships vital to this promising industry.

To understand the drill-down of what it takes to go from harvesting animal cells to creating consumer-facing products, it’s valuable to speak with visionaries such as Ido Savir, CEO of Israel’s SuperMeat. In addition to his knowledge of cultivated meat, Savir’s background in IT provides him with a panoramic view of the infrastructure needed to build a successful B2B company.

While it might not qualify as an awe-inspiring announcement, SuperMeat recently received a grant from the Israeli Innovation Authority to establish an open-source high-throughput screening system for optimizing cultivated meat feed ingredients. As an analogy, think of it as a system that ensures cows or chickens receive only the best quality feed to produce larger quantities of high-grade meat or chicken. But there is a significant difference.

Savir explains that animals are inefficient producers of their products. “It’s just done more efficiently (in cultivated meat),” the SuperMeat CEO told The Spoon in a recent interview. “In traditional meat production, 70% to 80% of the cost comes from the feed, and animals are just not very efficient conversion machines.” To put it into perspective, the cost of animal component-free (ACF) feed can make or break those vying to play in this space.

Rather than compete with consumer-facing brands such as Future Meat, Eat Just, and Mosa Meat (to name a few), SuperMeat is taking a B2B approach. Working with established meat and poultry providers to build production facilities where companies with existing supply chains can quickly enter the future of the alt-meat market. SuperMeat has announced deals with Germany’s PHW Group and Migros in Switzerland. The Israeli firm is in discussion with potential U.S. partners to reach the stateside market by the end of 2023.

The decision to build a platform for cultivated meat rather than build its own consumer brand directly results from Savir’s tech background, and it is also why the new feed screening system is in the open-source approach. “From my background, and I really believe in open source, and I really believe in sort of a platform approach that can help bring not just one company but the industry forward,” Savir stated.

Also, speaking to his tech background, it’s clear Savir has learned the relationship between capital expenditures and profit. It’s not about cost; it’s about having the right model.

“The way I look at this, and it doesn’t matter how much the infrastructure costs,” he said. “What matters is how efficient and the return you can get from that money. Right. And if you can get that return in a reasonable time, it makes sense, no matter what the cost is. We have our cost of goods models that demonstrate that that makes sense.”

A trip to SuperMeat’s facility in Israel will yield more than a view of lab equipment and many steel fermentation tanks. The facility includes a small restaurant-like space called “The Chicken,” where potential business partners, consumers, and others can taste the lab-grown animal protein. Savir says it’s more than just a pretty place to show off.

“We’re trying to do things a bit differently,” Savir said. “We thought it was important for us and our potential clients, which are food companies, to have that full transparency and traceability.”

See video of the makeshift eatery below:

World's First Cultivated Meat Blind Tasting Full Reel

SCiFi Foods Raises $22M With Andreessen Horowitz’s First Investment in Cultivated Meat

SCiFi Foods, a Bay Area-based food tech startup, announced that it has raised a $22 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), making it a16z’s first investment in the growing cultivated meat market. The company, formerly known as Artemys Foods, also announced that it will be adding a new board member, Myra Pasek, the General Counsel of IronOx, who will be utilizing her expertise from Tesla and Impossible Foods to help SCiFi Foods bring its novel plant-based and cultivated meat hybrid through regulatory approval to the market. 

The new funding raises SCiFi Foods’ total funding to $29 million and will primarily be used to scale R&D efforts, build out the leadership team, and market the company. 

The Spoon sat down with CEO and co-founder, Joshua March, to learn more about SCiFi Foods’ new name, a hybrid meat product, and what it looks like to raise funding from one of the most famous venture capital firms during a recession.

What’s the story behind the rebrand? 

The original company name had always been a holding name. Over the last year, we spent a lot of time doing research and thinking about our brand strategy and positioning. First, while I’m really excited about our strategy, and I think what we’re doing is pretty unique and will give us the ability to get to market, we know that we’re going to be launching a brand in a very noisy old meat market. We knew that if we wanted to be able to have a shot of building a truly defining brand, we needed to do something that was really distinctive, and very different to anything else that was out there today. 

We also knew that in the cultivated meat space, one of the biggest concerns that consumers will have is that it’s too scientific. The vast majority of average consumers are calling it lab grown meat. A lot of the attacks from the meat lobby, also go off on it for being lab grown meat. We think it’s really important to confront that head on, not by trying to hide the science, but by being really authentic, transparent, and bold about it. 

Besides the branding, how does the technology of SCiFi Foods stand out from other types of cultivated meats, alternative proteins, and other meat hybrids? 

It’s the combination of plant based and cultivated meat. What we found was that cultivated meat was having incredible effects on flavor, creating a much more beefy flavor and aroma than any plant based trial. Fundamentally, the most important thing is to create incredibly tasty products. And by taking a blended approach, it massively simplifies our ability to bring a product to market because we don’t need to do more tissue engineering, 3d printing scaffolding, and other complex technologies that are required if you’re trying to create 100% cultivated meat, which no one today actually knows how to do at scale cheaply. 

Our approach allows us to create really transformational products, but also allows us to actually get to market from an equal timeframe with costs that are actually closer to conventional meat. Taste and cost define the market size for meat alternatives. 

Besides taste and cost, another challenge can be regulatory approval. How does having a hybrid product help you navigate the uncertain regulatory landscape today? 

If anything, it helps. The FDA and the USDA have a pretty clear regulatory framework on how to bring cultivated meat to market. Because our approach means that we don’t have scaffolding and tissue engineering, that reduces the amount of things that we need to take through regulatory approval. 

What are your plans to scale your product and bring it to market? 

Over the next couple of years, we’re planning on building out a pilot facility and going through the regulatory approval process. Once we’ve gone through that process, and we’ve had the facility approved, then the plan will be to do a small scale commercial launch.

Do you think consumer willingness will change between now and when you’re ready for commercial launch? 

The major trends of more people, recognizing the huge environmental cost, especially with beef, is only getting bigger. People are also getting more comfortable with technology being used in the development of food. Younger generation of consumers feel those things even more strongly. 

Even with transparency around technology, there’s still questions about the development and environmental impacts of cultivated meat. How is SciFi Foods targeting those questions? 

We’ve done a lot of work, understanding those impacts. We’re very confident that the climate impacts of our products is a fraction of the climate impacts of eating conventionally. 

Beef is the least efficient of all meats in terms of calories in calories out is 3-10% efficiency, it’s a small percentage; fundamentally growing cells in a bioreactor in terms of energy in and energy out is 97% efficiency, so drastically different. And with beef, up to 80% of deforestation in the Amazon, can be traced back to the cattle industry, either pasture land or as to grow crops, that animal feed. All the methane emissions that come up like 30% of methane emissions in the US come from cattle, one of the most potent greenhouse gas emissions. 

And when you look at the emissions of complicated means, it’s basically no land use changes, minimal water, no methane emissions, you do have energy usage for powering the bioreactors. That’s less than the emissions from a cow. And, if you count that for renewable energy, then the climate impact becomes zero.

Is there a reason why SciFi Foods is targeting cultivated beef first, rather than dairy, chicken, or other meat products? 

There’s a number of reasons for focusing on beef. It does have the biggest climate impacts. It’s also one of the biggest markets. It’s also the most expensive. The highest demand for meat alternatives is also beef. And yet, in the cultivated meat space, most cultivated meat companies are going after chicken, which is complex. And the reason for doing so is basically that it’s scientifically easier to manufacture chicken cells.

What makes a16z a great partner for funding at this stage? 

a16z is one of the best investors in the world and a key part of their model is that they’re not just financial investors, but they also bring a lot of support, in terms of, help with HR, recruiting, the best practices, introductions to other investors, and various different areas. I’ve worked with a lot of VCs over my career, and they definitely have the best set of support functions and ways of helping founders and entrepreneurs that I’ve ever seen.

A lot of a16z’s track record has been with technology and they just announced a new crypto fund. What specifically are you looking for in terms of help with foodtech? 

It’s worth noting that they have a very substantial bio fund, which led our investments. And that fund is completely focused on the intersection of biotech and synthetic biology. In many ways we combine those things. Yes, we do consumer food and food tech, but we’re also doing synthetic biology and biotech and sitting at that intersection. They have a huge amount of experience, and connections with VCs, and executives, scientists, and advisers in a lot of the real scientific work that we need to do to bring our product to market.

A lot of private funding lately hasn’t been very active and it’s been hard for startup founders to raise. What has navigating that landscape and raising a round been like for you? 

The market is very volatile right now. There’s always capital looking for really great companies that have a very differentiated approach and the ability to drive a significant IP advantage and who can have a defensible advantage. Fundamentally, that’s what an investor needs in order to be able to pack a company that can have a big impact on the world, but also have a great financial return.

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Lines Up Partners to Scale Up Cultivated Meat Production

The great cultivated meat scale-up has begun. Or, at the very least, the game plan for one of the industry’s most high-visibility players is finally coming into view.

That startup is Eat Just, Inc., which has announced two significant partnerships for its Good Meat group, the company’s cultivated meat division, over the past week. The first partnership, announced last week, is with food/ag conglomerate ADM, which will partner with Eat Just to optimize the growth factors and nutrients in the cell culture growth media. According to the announcement, the two will work together to create a growth medium “for quality, cost and volume.”

The second partnership, announced today, is with ABEC, a biomanufacturing engineering and services company, to build out Good Meat’s manufacturing facilities. The multi-year agreement will see ABEC “design, manufacture, install and commission the largest known bioreactors for avian and mammalian cell culture.”

According to the announcement, the deal is for the production of ten 250,000-liter bioreactors, which will form the foundation for GOOD Meat’s large-scale cultivated meat facility. The production complex, which will be located in the United States, will have the capacity to produce up to 30 million pounds of cultivated meat. The new facility will initially produce chicken and beef products and have a nationwide distribution footprint.

While 30 million pounds sounds like a lot, it represents less than one-tenth of one percent of the aggregate meat consumption in the US. Still, it’s not nothing. The planned production represents a significant leap over any other announced production capacity (Upside’s pilot plant, announced last year, will eventually have a capacity of 400 thousand pounds of meat per year).

Some may dismiss these efforts as hardly making a dent in overall meat consumption but Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick and others have made it clear that the effort to scale up this industry will take decades, not years. These efforts to produce cell-cultivated meat at this scale will undoubtedly provide lessons for an industry collectively looking to figure out the science and technology of doing something that’s never been done before.

 

UPSIDE’s New Investment Dollars Pushes The Company To the Front of the Cultivated Meat Line

Picture this: It’s late 2023, or perhaps 2024. Renowned Austin pitmaster and entrepreneur Aaron Franklin finishes up tending to his smokers after a long night of preparing to feed the onslaught of barbeque fans. Those queued up along Branch Street in East Austin are in for a surprise; that day, instead of the usual prime brisket rubbed with Aaron’s secret coffee-based rub, the star of the day is meat that comes from a place other than a ranch and slaughterhouse. Welcome to the world of cultivated meat.

In such a scenario, UPSIDE Foods is likely to be at the forefront of cultivated meat choices for restaurants and later consumers. Armed with an additional $400 Million in Series C financing, the Berkeley, Calif.-based company is among the leaders in the cultivated meat, poultry, and seafood industry. With these new funds, UPSIDE (formerly Memphis Meats), reaches the milestone of a $1 billion valuation. The funds will be used to expand its production footprint, additional R&D for the next generation of products, consumer education, and enhance its supply chain.

Yes, it is a gamble to fund companies in the cultivated meat space given the lack of governmental approval in the form of the FDA and USDA. Amy Chen, UPSIDE’s COO, admits she has no crystal ball, regarding when cultivated meat will get the green light in the U.S., but is confident the market demand will encourage governments-not just in the U.S.—to provide thoughtful oversight without becoming a roadblock.

“We have had years of extensive dialogue and collaboration with the regulators,” Chen told The Spoon in a recent interview. “We are fully confident that globally there is a market for it and there are eager governments that will pursue it.”

The Series C round is co-led by Temasek, a global investment company headquartered in Singapore, and the Abu Dhabi Growth Fund (ADG), a new investor. Other new investors include Baillie Gifford, Givaudan, John Doerr, SALT fund, and Synthesis Capital. They are joined by existing investors Bill Gates, Cargill,  Cercano Management, CPT Capital, Dentsu Ventures, Singapore-based global investor EDBI, Kimbal and Christiana Musk, Norwest Venture Partners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, SOSV’s Indie Bio, and Tyson Foods.

Chen is especially proud of the large cross-section of investors that represent varied interests from venture firms to companies entrenched in the agricultural space that produce conventional meat and poultry. It is that wide range of support, she believes, that will help in consumer education as well as a long-term presence in the new food chain.

That said, there’s a lot of work that goes into convincing consumers to bite into a new type of food that is, to say the least, unconventional. Chen suggests that there is a group of early adopters in place ready to sample something new that offers a premium taste while providing the start of a solution to creating a more sustainable global food supply.

“When I think about the adoption of any new technology,” UPSIDE’s COO commented, “There are always the cutting-edge early adopters. Folks who have two characteristics – one is they love food and are open to the next thing in food with an openness to innovation and new things. The other trait is being aware and an interested in addressing some of the challenges of conventional meats.”

The bottom line for Chen is the fact that her company’s cultivated meat has the taste of the real thing. “One of the things I am super passionate about, coming from the food world, is the taste of the Product,” she said.  “Ultimately, if it doesn’t taste good when the consumer puts it into their mouth, we have lost the journey.”

UPSIDE is not alone in this quest to bring cultivated meat to the masses. There’s Brazil’s JBS, Israel’s SuperMeat, GOOD Meat, and Mosa Meats, just to name a few. There are also other companies offering technology to aid in the process that facilitates the cultivation process. According to the Good Food Institute, 21 new companies in the cultivated meat space launched in 2021, a 32% increase from the previous year.

 Approval from the FDA comes in the form of a “no questions” letter from the FDA, followed by the USDA’s investment in plant inspection and labeling guidelines. Beyond those hurdles, there are other questions: will cultivated meat be considered Kosher/Halal (given there is no ritual slaughter)? And how will this new product be merchandised in stores? Does it belong in the current meat section alongside 80/20 ground round? Lastly, how will vegans react? No animal is killed, so how will those avoiding all things steak, hamburgers, et al react?

Only time will tell.

SuperMeat Partners With Japanese Food Giant Ajinomoto To Scale Cultivated Meat Production

SuperMeat, a cell-cultured meat company based in Israel, and Ajinomoto, a large Japanese food and biotechnology conglomerate, announced today the formation of a strategic partnership to “to establish a commercially viable supply chain platform for the cultivated meat industry.”

According to the announcement, the partnership, which will include an investment by Ajinomoto in SuperMeat, will combine SuperMeat’s expertise in cultivated meat with Ajinomoto’s R&D technology and expertise in biotech and fermentation capabilities.

One of the main focuses of the new partnership will be in the development of cell-cultured growth media, the broth which contains the nutrients needed for animal cell growth, which remains one of the biggest overall cost drivers in the creation of cultivated meat. According to a study by the Good Food Institute conducted in 2020 of cultivated meat producers, 72% of respondents indicated that cell growth media represented over 50% of their operating costs, and 38% said growth media represented 80% or more of operating costs. By combining SuperMeat’s technology advancements in cultivated meat with Anjinomoto’s biomanufacturing expertise, the two companies hope to drive down costs while increasing the supply of food-grade growth factors.

Anjinomoto’s partnership is a further signal of the interest by the Japan food industry in cell-cultured meat production. A number of Japanese investment funds recently participated in a $7 million investment round in Integriculture, one of Japan’s cultured meat pioneers, and before that Aleph Farms joined up with Mitsubishi to work on bringing cultured meat to the country. This interest in accelerating Japan’s cultivated meat industry is not surprising given the country’s historically low food self-sufficiency. Other countries with limited internal agriculture such as Singapore and Israel have identified future food sources like cultivated meat as strategically important, and Japan is following suit.

Cultivated Meat Has a Production Capacity Problem. Yossi Quint Has a Plan to Fix It.

Yossi Quint wants the cultivated meat industry to succeed. However, to reach its potential, he thinks the nascent industry has one major hurdle to overcome: a severe lack of production capacity.

Quint arrived at this conclusion while working at McKinsey, where he often worked on projects for clients in the food and beverage industry. During one deep dive into the cultivated meat market, he became convinced that this new form of food production had the potential to be a multibillion-dollar industry, but would never fulfill its potential unless it can increase production by orders of magnitude over its current capacity.

To get there, Quint believed that equipment used to make cell-cultivated meat – giant metal vats called bioreactors – needed to be built specifically for the market. That’s because bioreactors used by today’s cultivated meat producers are usually modified versions of hardware made for the pharmaceutical industry, an industry with completely different unit cost economics than that of food.

Out of this challenge, the idea for his company was born. Ark Biotech is building next-generation, high-volume bioreactors for the cultivated meat industry. I sat down with Quint to discuss the challenges of developing hardware for the cultivated meat industry and where he sees the infrastructure market going in the future. The answers have been lightly edited for brevity.

Why did you decide to start the company?

I was working at McKinsey had the opportunity to work with many different companies. And I had a chance to dig pretty deep into the cultivated meat space and think in-depth about what was needed in this industry to succeed over time—doing everything from consumer insights work to thinking about how to reduce unit economics and scale up. But, as I dug into scale-up, I quickly realized that biomanufacturing will be the bottleneck for this industry to grow. And that there are very few, perhaps no players, out there that are offering sensible solutions for industrial-scale cultivated meat production.

Today we’re seeing lots of companies building their pilot production plants. Over the next few years, as the industry figures it out and moves towards industrial scale, how big do you see cultivated meat bioreactors getting?

In pharma, there’s this trend towards smaller, single-use bioreactors. Single-use bioreactors are bioreactors with a bag inside that you switch out. They are very high OPEX (operating expense), but it reduces the contamination risk. But for the blockbuster drugs, you still have 10,000 to 25,000-liter bioreactor tanks. There’s no reason cultivated meat can’t be produced at that size or even larger.

What are the challenges that need to be overcome to move to bigger bioreactors?

There aren’t necessarily intrinsic issues. There are challenges when you reach a bigger scale; A contamination event has a larger cost because you’d have to throw out the batch, so that’s one reason to think about minimizing the size or guidance or ceiling. But to us, it’s a very simple optimization equation of ‘every batch is worth X dollars, the chance of contamination is y, where along the curve do you want to play’?

There are some thermodynamics, more physics and chemistry elements, such as where can you get the uniformity of the cell culture in the bigger size bioreactor. And that’s uniformity of oxygen, of making sure that mixing works correctly. It’s also making sure that the temperature can be uniform throughout.

A lot of what we’re working on is, how do you design bioreactors in ways that are different than what you’d see off the shelf today or from a specialized company, that could operate at bigger sizes?

Why are bigger bioreactors so important?

We care about size because it’s just a major cost lever. As a CAPEX (capital expense) cost lever and an OPEX (operating expense) cost lever.

Explain what you mean by that.

As a CAPEX lever, you get economies of scale. A lot of the cost of bioreactors is the manufacturing, and just you don’t need twice as many people producing twice the size. Most bioreactors have their own seed train (ed note: seed trains are used to generate an adequate number of cells for the inoculation of the production bioreactor). If you double the size of the bigger bioreactor, you only need half as many seed trains to get the same volume.

On the OPEX side, every seed train has laborers that are working, often 24/7, running experiments, changing parameters. And so, if you are able to double the size or triple or ten times the size, you don’t need ten times the laborers, you might need the exact same number of laborers.

Will all bioreactors be the same?

The bioreactors we’re designing are widely applicable to a very large swath of the industry. There are corner cases, but we’re trying to have bioreactors that will fit 95% of companies.

But there are a few bioreactor designs that we’re working on because if you’re doing a scaffolding system, that likely looks very different and you’ll need a very different looking bioreactor if you’re doing suspension cells. And so we are designing different bioreactors to fit those different use cases. Things like media or animal type. are heavily impactful to the parameters of the bioreactor, but we don’t think that changes the core bioreactor design.

The models will depend on their production methods. And it could be that you actually have two models, you have one model, where their cells are still growing in suspension, then you might want to then get a formed product and move into a second bioreactor. So there’s a number of companies that will have two production bioreactors today.

In the future, what does the cultivated meat industry production look like? Is it highly centralized, or does each city have its own ‘meat brewing’ center?

If I were to say 10 years, it’s still gonna be highly centralized. We’re gonna have megaplants. There’s just so many efficiencies that you get at scale.

Will they be regional?

It could be regional. It just depends on how big we want to go. I don’t think there’s gonna be one plant that supplies the US. It could be two or three plants in California that are very big the same way AB InBev has just a handful of massive plants.

Can you explain why bigger production plants are better?

One of the reasons that I think bigger plants make sense, at least as an interim step, is that we really think about the COGS (cost of goods sold) in a very deep way, a lot of which is like how do you get really cheap access to whatever the basal medium is. And to get really cheap access, you probably want to be located near where corn is shipped in, or whatever your other big ingredients are. You want to be near rail lines. You just want to get those economies of scale on the upstream. You also want to be co-located near cheap energy and preferably renewable energy. And so when you think about some of the inputs that you want, and just OPEX, and also where there is available labor, it’s harder to see a world in which you have a small production plant that’s in a skyscraper in New York.

Thank you for your time.

You’re welcome.

Meat 2.0: An American Opportunity

Guest Authors: Yossi Quint and Blake Byrne

Over the past half century, the U.S. went from being by far the biggest meat producer in the world to trailing China as a distant second. Today, the protein industry is confronted with a seismic innovation–the rise of alternative protein–that could again radically alter the world’s protein landscape. The alternative protein industry is growing quickly and has the potential to be the protein of the future. In China, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs recently included Cultivated meats and other alternative proteins like plant-based eggs as part of its 5-year blueprint for food security. Unfortunately, in the U.S., companies and government agencies are largely ignoring this revolutionary moment and are ceding an opportunity to lead the alternative protein industry to other countries. This strategy, or lack thereof, is antithetical to both our economic and security interests.

In 1961, the U.S. produced over 6x as much meat as China. Today, China produces almost 2x as much meat as the U.S. The gap between the two countries increases to 3x if you include seafood (170 million tons vs. 52 million tons). And the gap is only widening. A USDA report recently led with the headline “China Meat Supply Continues to Grow.” And the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 8% of all farmworker jobs (farm, ranch, and aquacultural animals) will be lost over the next decade. 

The U.S. wasn’t always a laggard in meat production and innovation. In 1878, cattle dealer Gustavus Swift commissioned the design of a refrigerated railroad car. This invention allowed for butchered meat to be shipped without going bad, enabling efficiencies in both the slaughtering and transport of meat. This technological innovation marked a watershed moment in the democratization of meat. For the first time, Americans across the country purchased cheaper and more diverse cuts of fresh beef. Meanwhile, Chicago became a rail hub for major meatpackers and the heart of a beef Empire in the West. The meatpackers’ quick ascent was supported by a regulatory environment that prioritized cheap and sanitary beef.  In the end, U.S. meatpackers leveraged their new position and government support, to become the world’s beef powerhouse. 

Today, we are at a similarly pivotal moment in the production of protein. The global introduction of alternative protein (plant-based meat, fermentation derived ingredients, and cultivated meat – meat grown from animal cells in a controlled environment) may well be a moment in the meat industry’s history of equal or greater importance than the introduction of refrigerated railroad cars. Alternative protein has experienced rapid growth over the past decade with major food and agriculture companies entering the space with billions of dollars in investments. Multiple tailwinds, such as consumers’ concern for sustainability, nutrition, and animal welfare, suggest that alternative protein will grow from less than 1% of total meat volume today, to 5%-10% of the global meat market over the next decade (see estimates from Barclays, BCG, Bloomberg).

Unlike traditional animal protein, alternative protein production does not require large grassy plains or low-cost soy to support the animals. Instead, the main need for the protein companies of tomorrow is large-scale manufacturing infrastructure, such as fermentation and bioreactor farms (massive brewery-like factories). The infrastructure required for the production of alternative protein can be built anywhere. 

Other countries have taken note. China is including these new types of protein in the roadmap for its future. Singapore, a country with minimal livestock production, became the first country in the world to approve the sale of cultivated meat, and is now considered an industry growth hub. Multiple startups now call Singapore home, owing to broad institutional support for the alternative protein industry by the government and state-backed investors. Qatar, another country with minimal historical livestock production, recently announced a deal with a U.S. company to commercialize cultivated-meat. One question now remains: will the U.S. capitalize on this new once-in-a-generation opportunity, or continue to lose jobs and market share to other countries?

Since the 19th century, the food system has become increasingly global. The shift from animal-based protein to alternative protein has the power to shift geographic centers of production and determine which corporations, new or old, command the trillion dollar fortunes attached to protein’s production. But the future is not predetermined. Where these major production centers develop and which companies will control the key infrastructure is still taking shape. Will the U.S. be a leader in this burgeoning space or go down the roads of solar energy and battery industries, which are now dominated by China. Alternative protein represents another critical inflection point for the U.S. to lead in a key industry of tomorrow. 

About the authors:Yossi Quint is the Founder & CEO of Ark Biotech, which develops cultivated meat production systems. Previously, Yossi was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Company where he specialized in alternative protein. Blake Byrne is a graduate student in biotechnology at the University of Cambridge. Previously, he served as the lead Science & Technology analyst for the Good Food Institute, an alternative protein think tank.

Former US Defense Official: Cell-Cultured Meat & Other Future Food Technology is Critical For US National Security

Last week, the future food industry was abuzz with the news that China had put cell-cultured meat and other future food technologies in its five-year plan.

According to Matt Spence, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Middle East Policy under the Obama administration, this type of move shouldn’t be all that surprising given how critical many leaders in emerging economies view food innovation to their national security.

“What what used to keep me up at night when I was at the Defense Department running Middle East policy was what type of attack is ISIS is going to launch?” said Spence last month, speaking on a panel (moderated by yours truly) at the Consumer Electronics Show. “How to plan for war with Iran? How are we thinking about going after Osama bin Laden?”

According to Spence, who is now managing director for investment and advisory firm Guggenheim Partners, what worried leaders around the region was very different.

“When I talked to leaders in the region, what kept them up at night was ‘do I have enough food and water to feed my population?’. They are realizing they have a way of producing meat that people want more of as they get wealthier, and others are appetites and demand for luxury change. And the equation doesn’t add up unless we do something new.”

While Spence himself may have come away from these conversations with a greater conviction that food technology is an essential part of a national security framework, the US still has no comprehensive plan around building a food future nearly seven years after he left the State Department. That’s not to say some parts of the US government responsible for food regulation and policy haven’t been slowly progressing on regulatory frameworks for some future food. Still, like with many things driven by US agencies, it’s all relatively piecemeal, and there’s no real cohesive strategy to it.

Maybe that will change. There are signs, after all, that the US government sees this as important, such as the recent grant given to Tufts to create an alt-protein center of excellence. But again, these are small gestures compared to the all-in approach we’ve seen from China, Israel, Taiwan, and other countries.

But who knows? As the Biden administration takes another swing at a slimmed-down Build Back Better bill in 2022 and works on other spending priorities in the second half of his term, let’s hope he and others in his administration begin to work on developing a more comprehensive, forward-looking plan to build a more sustainable food future. I’ve even written down a few ideas he could use to get started.

According to Spence, the timing is good for cell-cultivated meat and other future food technologies to begin making a difference.

“There’s a technology and a change we can make every day by what we eat, and I’m hard-pressed to find other areas of national security that there is that type of ready solution available.”

Just click play below if you want to watch the Future of Meat panel from CES 2022 to hear Matt Spence and others.