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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cultivated meat

A Tale of Two Startups: Why Cultivated Meat is So Close (And Yet so Far) From Disrupting Animal Ag

Last week, two contrasting stories painting very different pictures emerged from the cultivated meat industry.

The first highlighted the news that GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat arm of Eat Just, had received a “no questions” letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its cultivated meat product. This makes the company the second to gain FDA approval after UPSIDE Foods, demonstrating the industry’s proximity to finally bringing meat produced outside of animals to consumers.

The other news came from the founder of New Age Eats, Brian Spears, who announced the company’s closure in a LinkedIn post. According to Spears, the company was far from generating revenue, and due to recent retrenchment from venture investors, it failed to raise the necessary funds to continue.

From his post:

In our regulated industry, we can’t and won’t be able to sell for a while. Without revenue, we rely on other sources of capital. Investors proved to be the most efficient way to validate whether cultivated meat would be commercially viable. Unfortunately, with recent capital market turmoil, we have been unable to attract investment.

While the stories each tells are very different, together they underscore the precarious nature of this emerging industry. On one hand, the cultivated meat industry is tantalizingly close to commercializing a business with considerable potential to help end the cruel and environmentally damaging industrial animal agriculture industry. On the other hand, it reveals that creating meat in bioreactors involves a long, challenging, and highly capital-intensive journey that will likely see many early pioneers fail or be acquired by competitors before ever selling a product.

When I talked with Po Bronson, the managing director of IndieBio, back in November, he predicted that this year would see many companies struggle to raise their next round of funding and seek buyers.

“What I think we’re going to see here is markets constrict,” Bronson said on the Spoon Podcast. “They already are constricting right now. And you’re going to see a lot of companies unable to raise their next round.”

Of course, the difficulty of raising money isn’t unique to cultivated meat companies. Pretty much every category of startup is beginning to feel the pressure nowadays, a pressure no doubt made even more acute with the recent demise of SVB. But unlike many startup categories, cultivated meat has a particularly difficult problem in that the industry has a much longer road toward revenue than many of these industries.

In fact, while many companies like GOOD Meat and UPSIDE are already pretty far down the path towards commercializing this business, the amount of production capacity available to even the most well-funded and commercially mature cultivated meat startups is still just a tiny fraction of what they will eventually need to start producing meat to make even a small dent in traditional animal agriculture. To achieve mass-production scale, billions more will be needed to expand production capacity, develop cost-effective commercialization processes and technology, and educate consumers about this new form of meat.

This is why organizations like the Good Food Institute and the startups themselves have started advocating for government funding to assist with late-stage capital. In its latest outlook on the investment landscape for alternative proteins, GFI cited investment in the electric vehicle market as a potential model for the alt protein sector:

While global public investment in alternative proteins is growing, it is a drop in the bucket compared to other public climate investments. For example, global governments committed $500 billion to renewable energy development in 2022. The United States alone committed $7.5 billion last year to build a national network of electric vehicle charging stations. To realize a sustainable, secure, and equitable protein production system, governments must increase their commitments to alternative proteins, and the current market provides an opportunity to do so. 

I think this is the right thing to do, but I’m unsure how fast we’ll see similar dollar amounts flow from the U.S. government, especially given how entrenched traditional animal agriculture is as a political force. While billions in government subsidies are certainly a possibility, it’s hardly a foregone conclusion, and most likely not something we’ll see in the next couple of years.

Where does this leave the cultivated meat industry? In the near term, we’ll see accelerating industry consolidation. Early startups with promising technology in creating a particular type of cultivated meat will get acquired, as some of the bigger companies start to roll up technology to fast-track their efforts. We’ll also see more “full stack” companies that have the different pieces of the puzzle – multiple cell lines, enabling infrastructure, sustainable and FBS-free growth media technology – as they acquire assets that come on the market at prices well below what they cost to build.

We’ll see fewer early-stage startups with intentions to create their own cultivated meat funded, and what investment dollars are left for this space will increasingly go to those building enabling technology to help accelerate the process. Over the past year, we’ve already seen more companies building pick-and-shovel technology like bioreactors, scaffolding, and growth media becoming the primary focus for investors.

Long term, the industry will need a combination of enough industry proof points and success stories to reassure investors they’ll get a return on their investment and to possibly convince the government to allocate significant resources. Unlike the electric vehicle industry, which saw mass-produced E.V.s start rolling off the production lines before President Obama pledged $2.4 billion in grants towards the industry, the cultivated meat industry is probably a decade away from mass-market production.

Still, hope shouldn’t be lost. The collective goal of these companies is too important to give up on, and while the era of easy capital is over, I think we’ll see some companies emerge from these tough times with products that will touch millions of consumers.

But the ride will definitely be bumpy.

Japan Prime Minister Wants to Develop Cultivated Meat Industry To Help Create Sustainable Food Supply

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced plans to start developing Japan’s cellular agriculture industry with the aim of producing cultivated meat and fish, according to a story published today by the Japan news bureau, Nikkei.

“We will develop the environment to create a new market, such as efforts to ensure safety and the establishment of labeling rules, and foster a food tech business originating in Japan,” said Prime Minister Kishida as part of the announcement.

Nikkei reported that Kishida expanded on his plans at a House of Representatives Budget Committee on the same day, telling Nobuhiro Nakayama of the Liberal Democratic Party, “Foodtech, including cellular foods, is an important technology from the perspective of realizing a sustainable food supply. We have to support efforts that contribute to solving the world’s food problems.”

While Japan’s regulatory environment for the sale of cell-cultivated meat has been viewed by some as one that could create a fairly quick glide path as compared to other countries, there are still a few regulatory hurdles that need to be settled for cultivated meat to be sold to consumers. Last year the Japanese Health, Labor, and Welfare Ministry of Japan formed a team of experts to study the safety of cultivated meat and its associated production process. Almost a year later, the Japanese government is still defining what constitutes cultured meat as food and working to develop safety standards for raw materials and manufacturing processes.

Minister of Health, Labor and Welfare Katsunobu Kato said, “While paying close attention to the state of research and development, scientific findings on safety, and international trends, we will further consider what measures are necessary in terms of safety.”

Kishida’s focus on developing the cultivated meat industry is an encouraging sign for the numerous startups from the island nation that have been working on developing cultivated meat technology for the past few years. This includes Integriculture, which in 2021 announced the Culnet Consortium, an open innovation platform for the development of cell-cultured meat in Japan and beyond. Japan food conglomerate Ajinomoto is also eager to develop the market, having inked a deal last year with Israel-based cultivated meat startup Supermeat.

The support by Japan’s leading government officials also underscores a trend in which we’ve seen countries with low food sovereignty take a particular interest in new food technologies as a way to increase their self-dependence. Singapore and Israel have been similarly proactive, pushing for investment and accelerated regulatory pathways for sales of cultivated meat.

Here in the US. the path towards government approval of cultivated meat took a big step forward when 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. All eyes across the globe have been watching the U.S. government’s approval process closely and some believe we will see sales of cultivated meat to consumers sometime this year.

Czech Startup Mewery Makes Cultivated Meat with Microalgae

Czech startup Mewery announced today they have created the world’s first cultivated meat prototype using microalgae according to a release sent to The Spoon. The company says it used a hybrid culture medium with microalgae extracts to create cultivated meat consisting of 75% pork and 25% microalgae cells.

Why microalgae? The company says there are several benefits to using the hard-working microorganisms, including eliminating FBS (Fetal Bovine Serum) as a cultivating medium. Mewery says its process also lowers costs and provides additional nutritional benefits, including additional vitamins, antioxidants, minerals, fiber, and essential fatty acids. The company also says its cultivated meat is one hundred percent cellular, contrasting with many prototypes that rely on soy or pea proteins.

Above: Roman Lauš and the Mewery team

Based in the Czech Republic, Mewery was founded by longtime entrepreneur and event producer Roman Lauš. After becoming interested in the nascent cultivated meat space while developing the agenda for the Future Port Prague event in 2018, Lauš eventually decided to create his own company. By 2020, he had assembled a team, and after a couple of years of research and development, they made the company’s first prototype. Now, Lauš and his team aim to have its first consumer-ready products – the first of which will be pork meatballs and pork sausage – on the market in two years.

To get there, the company is seeking additional funding this year to fund continued work on its biobank cell repository and the buildout of large-capacity bioreactors to scale volume.

“In this way, we want to ensure a more or less unlimited source of pig cells, which will move us closer to large-scale production,” said Lauš.

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.