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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cultured meat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finless Foods Raises $3.5 Million for Cultured Bluefin Tuna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FDA to Hold Public Meeting on Cultured Meat

There has been a lot of activity and investment in the lab-grown meat, or “cultured” meat space in the past year. Enough so that it has attracted the attention of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which announced today that it will be holding a public meeting about cultured meat technology next month.

For the uninitiated, cultured meat is animal tissue grown in a lab setting. It’s typically made through the use of starter cells from the animal, which are then developed in some kind of medium (often fetal bovine serum) in a bioreactor, then scaffolded to provide shape or texture.

Ethical and environmental issues with raising animals for slaughter and consumption have driven much of the competition and advancement in the cultured meat space, with Memphis Meats, SuperMeat, Future Meat, Aleph Farms and JUST among the leaders of this new type of food.

While it was once ridiculously expensive to grow meat in a lab, the large number of players and technological developments in the space are bringing that price down, and it seems that the FDA wants to be fully prepared before cultured meat makes it to the grocery aisle.

A meeting entitled “Foods Produced Using Animal Cell Culture Technology” will be held on July 12 in College Park, Maryland. From the FDA’s site:

The public meeting will give interested parties and the public an opportunity to comment on these emerging food technologies. Specifically, the agency is asking for input, relevant data and information on the following questions:

  • What considerations specific to animal cell culture technology would be appropriate to include in evaluation of food produced by this method of manufacture?
  • What kinds of variations in manufacturing methods would be relevant to safety for foods produced by animal cell culture technology?
  • What kinds of substances would be used in the manufacture of foods produced using animal cell culture technology and what considerations would be appropriate in evaluating the safety of these uses?
  • Are the potential hazards associated with production of foods using animal cell culture technology different from those associated with traditional food production/processing?
  • Is there a need for unique control measures to address potential hazards associated with production of foods using animal cell culture technology?

In a statement, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., and FDA Deputy Commissioner Anna Abram said that they want to “help foster dialogue regarding these emerging food technologies.” It went on to assert the USDA’s jurisdiction over cultured meat because, well, cultured meat is food, after all.

In reaction to the FDA’s announcement today, The Good Food Institute, which helps promote the work being done on clean meat, released a statement of its own saying “We are heartened to see that FDA is engaged in thinking through how clean meat can come to market under the existing regulatory framework. We are also encouraged that the FDA commissioner has acknowledged the benefits of clean meat, including animal welfare and environmental impacts. The United States has a robust food regulatory regime that is more than capable of ensuring that clean meat is safe and truthfully labeled.”

Speaking of labels, the FDA said this meeting will also include what we should actually label lab-grown meat. Cultured meat has raised the hackles of traditional meat producers who do not want the waters of what we consume muddied. Earlier this year, the United States Cattlemen’s Association filed a petition with the USDA asking for beef labeling requirements. The Cattlemen were specifically asking that “…any product labeled as “beef” come from cattle that have been born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner, rather than coming from alternative sources such as a synthetic product from plant, insects, or other non-animal components and any product grown in labs from animal cells.”

If our recent “Future of Meat” meetup in Seattle is any indication, the public meeting next month promises to be a rousing event, and more importantly, the start of a broader discussion around alternative meats. If you’re going, be sure to drop us a line and tell us how it went.

Food Tech News: Celebrity Meal Kits, Beer Delivery, and UberEats Drones

This was a pretty thrilling week for food-related innovation in big data and AI. We wrote about a patent that lets Facebook see inside your fridge and recommend personalized recipes. Google debuted its Duplex technology, which allows it to hold freakishly realistic-sounding phone conversations (listen to it make a restaurant reservation, it’s insane). Perhaps most importantly of all, we wrote about a man who cracked the code for perfect chocolate chip cookies.

And now it’s time for our weekly food tech news roundup. We’ve got stories featuring clean meat labeling, drones, beer delivery, and Chrissy Teigen — let’s dive in:

Photo: Wikipedia.

Uber tests food delivery drone
UberEats has launched a trial program in San Diego testing food delivery via drone, reported Bloomberg. The world’s largest food delivery program could now theoretically drop off your pad thai in as little as five minutes, according to UberEats CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. Of course that’s presuming that the food you’re ordering is already made, but still — that’s quite a bit speedier than even the fastest average food delivery wait time (from, you guessed it, UberEats).

 

Photo: Blue Apron.

Blue Apron teams up with Chrissy Teigen
Just a week after meal kit service Blue Apron announced they were putting their wares on Costco shelves, they revealed more news: they’re collaborating with model/cookbook author/Instagram celebrity Chrissy Teigen on a six-week lineup of recipes and ingredient boxes. The series will start on June 4th and, despite their launch into retail, will only be available via online delivery.

 

Photo: Pizza Hut.

Pizza Hut expands beer delivery
Pizza Hut launched a test program in Phoenix in December to deliver beer and wine alongside their cheesy crust-stuffed pies. Now they’re rolling out that test program in over 100 locations in Arizona and California, with plans to continue expansion later this month. It’s also adding beer partners; the original test was with Anheuser-Busch, but the pizza chain has reportedly added MillerCoors as a partner in brews.

 


Congress might approve lab-grown meat regulation
Quartz reported that a proposed spending bill approved by a congressional subcommittee includes a provision that would give the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) the power to regulate how lab-grown meat is labeled and inspected. It’ll go next to the full, 46-member House Agriculture Committee, and, if passed, would have huge implications for a hotly-contested issue: the labeling of cultured meat.

Did we miss any interesting, thought-provoking food tech stories from the week? Tell us in the comments or tweet us @TheSpoonTech.

Beyond Burger(s): Aleph Farms Wants to Grow Steak Outside the Animal

It’s not even to market yet, and Israeli-based startup Aleph Farms already wants to shake up the cultured meat industry. They’re developing a new way to grow clean meat; one that will (hopefully) give it the same texture, taste, and eating experience as its traditional counterparts. 

Co-founders Didier Toubia (CEO) and Professor Shulamit Levenberg (CSO) started Aleph Farms in 2017. Levenburg had been researching tissue engineering for medical purposes for 15 years, but turned her attention to growing complex-textured meats in 2016. Today Aleph Farms’ scientists work out of a lab in the Weizmann Institute of Science just south of Tel Aviv.

What sets Aleph Farms apart from other cultured meat companies is their focus on two things: structure and texture. They want to go way beyond ground meat, which is what other companies like Memphis Meats and Mosa Meats have been able to make so far — Aleph hopes to produce something that has the same complex texture and mouthfeel as, say, grass-fed steak. They’re also focusing strictly on beef, partially because of its disproportionately high environmental footprint, but also because it’s much more challenging to replicate than chicken or duck.

Of course, all cultured meat companies hope to eventually make a product that replicates the texture and shape of traditional meat. But Aleph Farms is unique on how single-mindedly they approach the problem. Instead of starting with a simpler ground “meat” product and later developing 3D tissue-growing technology, they’re hoping to skip ahead and bring a fully developed product — one with the same texture, structure, and taste as beef — to market.

To do that, their scientists are working on growing four types of cells: muscle, fat, blood vessels, and connective tissue. While those last two might not sound very appetizing, Toubia said that they’re critical to replicating the texture of meat. Once they cultivate the various types of cells, they place them on scaffolds which act as a framework for the cells to cling onto. That way, the four types of cells can grow together into a finished product with the shape of steak — not just blobs of separate cell types in petri dishes that have to be manually combined.

According to Toubia, Aleph Farms is the only company developing this technology for beef.

Toubia hopes to grow meat much like farmers grow plants.

But they’re is still a ways away from making a steak that would fool anyone. Toubia said that they’re still in the R&D phase, and probably wouldn’t finish developing their first product for a few years. After that, they’ll still have to scale up production and make their “meat” affordable.

With JUST Foods aiming to make the first sale of a cultured meat product by the end of 2018, and Finless Foods and Memphis Meats not far behind (2019 and 2021, respectively), Aleph Farms won’t win the race to bring clean meat to market. But if they can achieve their goal of growing meat outside a cow that’s indistinguishable from “the real thing,” the startup might be able to convert the more hardcore carnivores who won’t be swayed by reasonable meat approximations. Slow(er) and steady might not be such a bad thing.

If cultured meat ever hopes to disrupt — or even replace — the meat industry, it has to mimic meat exactly. Mark Post, who made the first lab-grown burger in 2013 and started the company Mosa Meats, wrote that it has to “recreate conventional meat in all of its physical sensations, such as visual appearance, smell, texture and of course, taste.”

That means that a cultured steak not only has to look and taste like a steak, it also has to have the same texture, the same mouthfeel, and the react the same way as it’s cooked. And, considering that the only lab-grown meat we’ve seen so far has been made of thousands of muscle strands smushed together with added fat, flavor, and coloring, we’ve got a long way to go.

But Aleph Farms has a leg up on the competition in a few ways.

First and foremost, according to Toubia, are their connections. Specifically Professor Levenberg’s extensive experience in tissue engineering, which informs the core of Aleph Farms’ production methods.

They also have friends in quite high places. The startup partnered with Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, and participated in Israeli food-tech incubator The Kitchen, which is owned by food product manufacturing giant Strauss Group. That means that Strauss Group invested in, and has a direct stake (steak?) in Aleph.

Though Strauss Group isn’t particularly active in meat products, this relationship still brings to mind stories like Tyson Foods’ investment in Memphis Meats and Future Meat. 

Aleph Farms is also in a promising area for cultured meat. They’re based in Israel, along with other clean cultured meat companies Supermeat and Future Meat. Toubia guessed that this concentration was probably thanks to a few factors: Israel’s friendliness towards entrepreneurs, their expertise in and open laws about stem cells; and their large vegan community.

Talk of Israel brought our conversation to a question that often comes up when discussing the implications of cultured meat: will lab-grown pork be kosher? According to Toubia, the answer will depend on whether or not clean meat is considered “meat” from a religious perspective. If it is, cultured pork will not be kosher; but if it’s not, it would be. Which could radically change the diet of Jews that keep kosher, or Muslims who keep Halal, or Hindus who abstain from beef, etc.

As with most labeling issues around lab-grown meat, there’s no consensus on this issue yet. But Toubia likes this question because it gives him an opportunity to clarify what the cultured meat he’s working on actually is: “It’s really meat,” he said. “The end product is real meat cells which are not modified, just grown outside the animal.” So while the production method might differ, the end result is the same.

Though we may call what they make lab-grown meat, at least for now, Aleph Farms’ finished product will not be grown in a lab. “The cultured meat that people buy in grocery stores will not be grown in a lab,” said Toubia. Instead, he said it will be grown in a facility similar to a brewery — though he views it more like a farm. “I like to think of those facilities as ‘biofarms,’ places to farm animal tissue,” Toubia said. Which is why they decided to include “farms” in the name of their company. 

Aleph Farms is currently venture backed; they raised a seed round for an undisclosed amount in 2017, and are starting the process for a Series A round this year. Which puts them quite a bit behind other cultured meat companies who have already raised millions of dollars from high-profile investors like Bill Gates, Cargill, and Richard Branson. 

However, if they can nail the texture of a steak, Aleph Farms has a real shot at converting even the most hardcore of carnivores. And that, we’re happy to wait for.

A Peek Inside JUST’s Clean Meat Lab

Last June, JUST, the company formerly known as Hampton Creek, announced out of nowhere that they would bring lab-grown meat to market by 2018. If they succeed, they would be the first to do so; Finless Foods hopes their cultured fish will gain price parity with bluefin tuna by 2019, and Memphis Meats is aiming to premiere their cultured meat in 2021.

But it’ll be an uphill battle to get there. Soon after their announcement about lab-grown meat nearly all of JUST’s board resigned, leaving only Josh Tetrick, their very charismatic (and polarizing) CEO. Their former cellular agriculture director also left the company in early 2018 to start his own cultured animal product venture. (The new CTO who oversees the cellular agriculture team has been there since November.) At the same time, though, JUST has raised a total $310M in funding over the years, which is light years away from other clean meat startups (Memphis Meats has currently raised $20.1M). Can a company such high-profile turnover and drama, along with 125 employees and some pretty hefty capital, achieve its very ambitious vision of being the first to bring cultured meat to market?

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I was able to get a peek behind the heavily guarded doors of JUST (well, there was only one guard, but still) and take a tour of this buzzy startup — including their clean meat lab. I came in feeling skeptical and left much the same … but also oddly inspired.

A few of the plants in JUST’s library.

JUST is the prototypical millennial-heavy food tech startup, complete with geometric logos, repurposed factory workspaces, and lots of robots.  First I was led through the discovery platform, the part of JUST where scientists use custom-built robots to test plants from across the globe, determining their potential in vegan food products. Next, those plants go to the product development area; a fancified, high-tech kitchen staffed by chefs, many with Michelin stars.

During my tour I got to try a few flavors of JUST’s signature eggless mayo (really darn good) and their vegan cookies (tasted like normal cookies, though I suppose that was the point). But the coolest thing I sampled was their eggless scramble. Made of mung beans, the pale yellow liquid perfectly acted just like eggs, forming curds in the hot pan that were virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. The only giveaway was the beany flavor, though their VP of Product Development Ben Roche told me they’re working currently working on a new version that tastes more egg-like.

All the usual players, but vegan.

The fact that it cooks so much like regular scrambled eggs would make it an easy swap for foodservice — even easier than the real thing, since they don’t have to blend up the eggs first. Roche told me that they’re also working on pre-cooked eggless patties. I could see them putting those on the breakfast menu of a fast-food chain, following in the footsteps of partnerships like Impossible Foods and White Castle. For now, though, Just Scramble is only available in only a few restaurants in San Francisco and Hong Kong, though they’re hoping to expand it soon. 

No eggs, just mung beans!

The area of JUST I had the highest expectations for was their clean meat lab. It’s also the area where I learned the least — though I suppose I wasn’t really expecting JUST to give away all their secrets so easily. (Sorry, no photos allowed in here.)

For a company that claims they’ll produce enough cultured meat to bring to market by the end of this year, the lab was surprisingly small. The room was filled with incubators growing cells cultures, bioreactors, and a small area behind a plastic curtain where a scientist was pipetting something into wells. (I was not allowed behind the curtain.)

In the corner of the room was a machine filled with shaking bottles. Vitor Espirito Santo, the Senior Scientist of Cellular Agriculture at JUST, explained to me that the bottles contained proliferating muscle cells; in order to scale up their meat production to a marketable scale, they have to grow them in suspension. Espirito Santo told me that the plan was to transfer the cells into larger and larger bioreactors (the vessels where cultured meat is grown) as their technology improved. The largest one they had in the lab was 2 liters — which is pretty small, though JUST says they want to scale up to pilot plant facilities in the near future.

What JUST’s lab-grown burger will look like.

Despite my skepticism, Espirito Santo was adamant that JUST’s lab-grown meat would be available by the end of 2018 as promised. When I pressed him for details but all I got was “It will be something avian.” The technology required to grow meat with the texture of a chicken breast isn’t evolved enough for mass production, so I’m predicting that their first product will be some sort of ground turkey or chicken. JUST’s press office also clarified with me that they were aiming to make the first commercial sale of clean meat by the end of 2018, subject to regulatory considerations — which, as we’ve written about before, could slow things down considerably. 

Though they’re planning to be the first to bring clean meat to market, JUST’s chief focus seemed to be developing plant-based media. If they’re successful it would be a huge boon for the cultured meat industry. Many clean meat labs use fetal bovine serum (FBS) as the media in which to grow their muscle cells. FBS, however, is very expensive and also (duh) not vegan. If JUST can succeed in developing a plant-based media as effective and versatile as FBS, they have a real shot at making clean meat affordable, scalable, and 100% animal-free.

They’re not the first company to work on developing an alternative to animal-based media. In fact, Shojinmeat, a resource for people growing cultured meat at home, has found a way to do away with FBS altogether, using yeast extract as their media. Yeast extract isn’t a perfect solution — it only works with certain types of cells and doesn’t catalyze as much growth as FBS — but it is an exciting step towards inexpensive, plant-based media.

To me, the most provocative part of the clean meat lab wasn’t what Espirito Santo and his team were doing (or not doing), but what they hoped to do someday. Two drawings on the wall of the clean meat lab laid out their vision for the future of meat: a utopian architectural plan of a vertically integrated cultured meat production facility.

On one end of the property is a farm where they grow the plants for their cell media. On the other are the giant vats where the meat is grown, which lead to a factory where the meat is “assembled” on conveyor belts with 3D printing technology. The only humans involved in the process were walking between the belts doing quality control. The factory has glass walls, so the whole affair is transparent – literally and metaphorically. Consumers could come to the facility, watch their meat being printed out, and select cuts for their dinner. Sort of like a visit to one of those places you can watch cheese being made before buying a wheel, but with cultured meat. 

Espirito Santo said they want that setup to be the same size as the largest slaughterhouse in the U.S. If he and his team can make plant-based media, and if 3D printing technology improves to allow for those production speeds, their goal could actually be attainable. 

I couldn’t help but wonder if it might be more productive, from a price and efficiency point of view, for JUST to simply put their resources into developing plant-based meats that taste the same as the “real” thing. For example, Seattle Food Tech is developing vegan chicken nuggets — and manufacturing technology to make them scalable — which seems like a much more feasible way to take a bite out of the meat industry. Omnipork and Beyond Meat are developing plant-based pork and beef burgers, respectively. Which begs the question: If people can’t taste the difference, will they really care if their pork chop is made of muscle cells grown in a bioreactor, or plants made to have the same taste and texture as meat? This question seems especially relevant since, outside of the clean meat lab, all of JUST’s resources are focused on making plant-based versions of animal products, such as their eggless scramble.

While I think that JUST’s claim that they’ll bring lab-grown meat to market by 2018 is definitely a stretch, you have to respect their self-assuredness. The word “disrupt” gets thrown around a lot in the field of food innovation, but JUST really is trying to radically shake up the way we eat. They want to replace some of our most beloved foods — scrambled eggs, mayonnaise, and hamburgers — with vegan taste-alikes, and so far they’ve been pretty successful. We’ll have to see if their vision for cultured meat comes to pass, or if it’s just a drawing on the wall. 

——

This article has been updated to reflect that JUST plans to be the first to make a commercial sale of cultured meat, not bring it to mass market, barring regulatory considerations. We also clarified that the CTO overseeing the cellular agriculture program has been at JUST since November. 

Scoop: Seattle Food Tech Raises $1M to Jumpstart Plant-Based Meat Manufacturing

You’ve heard of Impossible Foods, you’ve heard of Beyond Meat — but there’s a new plant-based meat company on the scene. Seattle Food Tech launched in 2017 and recently raised a $1 million seed round, led by Fifty Years and Blue Horizon.

The nascent company hopes to produce plant-based meat at a scale and price comparable to traditional meat. In February, they finished developing their first product: a “chicken” nugget made of textured wheat, oil, chicken flavoring, cornstarch, and corn breading. What sets the product above its humble ingredients and makes it so good, according to founder and CEO Christie Lagally, is how it’s processed.

“It’s really all about the processing,” she told The Spoon. In order to make plant-based meat at scale and at a price competitive with meat, plant-based food companies have to develop intensive manufacturing technology specialized to their product.

This is the big way that Seattle Food Tech is disrupting the meat — heck, even the plant-based meat — industry. Along with several partners and equipment suppliers, Lagally is working on developing specialized machines for plant-based meat production. Essentially, she wants to industrialize the meat alternative industry.

At the moment, the “nuggets” are made through a contract manufacturer. However, the end goal of Seattle Food Tech is to start a facility specifically designed to manufacture plant-based products on a large scale. If they succeed, Lagally believes that it would be the first and only company to do so.

Seattle Food Tech also distinguishes itself from other plant-based meat companies in its go to market strategy. While Impossible Foods goes after restaurants and Beyond Meat sells on supermarket shelves, the Seattle-based company plans to market their product wholesale to institutional dining halls, such as school and hospital cafeterias.

By opting not to sell their nuggets as a CPG, Seattle Food Tech would be able to offer them at roughly the same cost as meat — around $2 per serving. Lagally says that eventually, once they get their volumes up, they might consider putting their products in large grocery stores, such as Walmart and Costco.

They hope to have their nuggets in schools and hospital dining halls by fall of 2018. Next up, they want to tackle “chicken” strips, which, along with nuggets, are two of the most eaten low-cost chicken products. This is a tougher mechanical lift than the nuggets, since replacing the strip will require extrusion to mimic the texture.

Lagally said that Seattle Food Tech will use their funding to hire staff and continue developing specialized manufacturing equipment.

“Fundamentally we can’t replace meat if it’s not convenient, good tasting, priced well, and widely available,” said Lagally. To do that, Seattle Food Tech will need some very innovative manufacturing technology — and some very good-tasting nuggets.

Food Tech News Roundup: DIY Food Printers, Salad Analytics, Ramen Robots

It’s time for your weekly dose of food tech news! This is when we take a look at some of the stories from the week which intrigued us and put them all in one convenient place.

This week we’ve got stories about lab-grown meat, DIY 3D bioprinter building, and sushi-serving robots. Get yourself a big mug of coffee and settle in for a read.

Lab-grown meat company Wild Type gets a funding boost

Cultured meat company Wild Type raised $3.5 million this week in a seed round led by firm Spark Capital with participation by Root Ventures, Mission Bay Capital, and other investors.

Wild Type is yet another player in the growing field of clean meat, along with startups like Memphis Meats, Mosa Meats, and Supermeat. Startup Finless Foods is also using cellular agriculture to culture fish in a lab, though they’re focused on bluefin tuna while Wild Type is working on salmon.

Wild Type hopes to use its new capital to speed up the development of its cultured salmon, increasing manufacturing capabilities while lowering costs. Their first product will be minced salmon meat intended for use in sushi, but they hope to eventually develop an animal-free lox and salmon filets.

 

 

Image: Adam Feinberg, HardwareX

Carnegie Mellon bioprinter could democratize 3D printing

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) recently developed a low-cost 3D bioprinter and are publishing the designs as open source so that anyone can build their own.

The researchers were able to cut costs by applying a syringe-based large volume extruder onto a standard desktop 3D printer (you have one at home, right?), essentially DIY-ing a 3D bioprinter. Bioprinters typically start at $10K to $20K and can cost up to $200K, but this MacGuyvered one can be built for under $500. It’s also easier to modify than a traditional 3D bioprinter.

Though the CMU team’s original research centers around organ tissue printing for transplants, their instructional abstract notes that these homemade bioprinters can perform “a wide range of 3D printing applications, including bioprinting, embedded printing, and food printing.” As we’ve covered on The Spoon before, 3D food printing is a massively underexplored area of food tech. Maybe these (relatively) affordable bioprinters will change that and make 3D food printing more accessible.

 

Image: Yoshikazu Tsuno, AFP via Mashable

Ramen-serving robots invade Seattle

Plenty USA will launch the new version of their AI-powered, Japan-made robot, dubbed ‘SOTA,’ in Seattle next month. The robot will premiere at JUNKICHI, a robota izakaya restaurant scheduled to open on April 15th in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.

SOTA sits atop restaurant tables and uses AI to recognize diners’ faces. It is meant to facilitate communication between customers and servers, though it seems like having a table-bound robot as the middleman would make communication more confusing, if anything. Users can also use the SOTA app to make the robot speak, having guided conversations while they snack on hot pots and grilled meats.

This will be the North American launch for SOTA, but the robot is already a regular fixture at an izakaya restaurant in Japan. (They’e begun their integration into restaurants in America, as well.) According to Market Insider, the restaurant reported a 10% jump in sales since it started using SOTA, and the robot is a popular attraction for dinners. We’ll have to wait and see if it has the same success in an American market.

P.S. Keep an eye out for The Spoon team to make a field trip and interact with these robots ourselves! And eat some sushi, of course.

 

Beer gets high

For those who hate to choose between their vices, there’s a new product for you. Keith Villa, the inventor of Blue Moon beer has partnered with Ebbu, a company that works with marijuana compounds, to launch a THC-infused, non-alcoholic beer in Colorado this fall. The brew is designed to have the marijuana hit the drinker at the same rate as if they were consuming a beer.

The team plans to develop a wheat beer, a light beer, and a stout. The product will launch in Colorado, but producers want to eventually sell it in all states where marijuana is legal.

Other brewers, such as Lagunitas, have infused beer with CBD, a cannabanoid which does not produce any hallucinatory effects. However, this Colorado-based brew will be the first to incorporate THC, which is what gives marijuana users the trademark “high.” Its success (or lack thereof) will speak to how flexible Americans are willing to get with their cannabis consumption.

 

SweetGreen harnesses analytics to inform its new menu

Earlier this week, fast-casual salad chain SweetGreen made a major menu chance. At first glance, it seemed that all they had done was tweak their offerings — but it’s the why, not the what, that’s so interesting.

SweetGreen’s menu changes were apparently a direct result of tech-driven insights. The company recently told Bloomberg that they now use blockchain to track their produce, and also to inform their app (which they launched in 2013). Through the app they collect customer analytics to determine which salads to keep, which to introduce, and which to take off their menu, all of which led to their new menu — the first major menu change in 10 years.

This change is an indicator of how fast casual joints, like Eatsa, are integrating tech into their service models to distinguish themselves from the competition. They’re also harnessing platforms like Toast and Ingest.ai to help run restaurant operations for efficiently and increase revenue. Which all goes to say that this restaurant market is one that will likely see a lot of growth and change — in salad toppings and beyond.

 

What’s in a Name (for Lab-grown Meat)?

A classic Portlandia sketch is one about the organic chicken served in a restaurant. In it, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein ask a server increasingly specific questions about the origins of the poultry they are about to order.

If you thought choosing between organic, grass-fed, free-range, GMO, and locally sourced animal proteins was tough, just wait a few years, because the rise of lab-grown meats is going to add an entirely new layer of complexity to what and how we label our meat choices.

Portlandia - In the restaurant

Lab grown meats aren’t even widely available yet, but they’re enough of a concern that the United States Cattlemen’s Association (USCA) filed a petition with the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, asking for new beef labeling requirements.

From the USCA’s petition:

USCA requests that FSIS limit the definition of beef to product from cattle born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner. Specifically, FSIS should require that any product labeled as “beef” come from cattle that have been born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner, rather than coming from alternative sources such as a synthetic product from plant, insects, or other non-animal components and any product grown in labs from animal cells.

The USCA wants to make sure that anything labeled “beef” or “meat” in your grocery store or restaurant comes straight from a once-living cow, without a stopover in a lab.

But you can understand why the USCA might have a, well, beef with these newcomers, as lab-grown meat has received a lot of investor interest recently. Just last week, Tyson Foods announced it had invested an undisclosed sum of money into Memphis Meats, which also counts Cargill and Bill Gates among its investors. Then there’s SuperMeat, the Israeli company that raised $3 million last month for its lab-grown chicken. And lest we forget, Leonardo DiCaprio invested in Beyond Meat last summer.

Before we go any further, let’s pause to accept--and then set aside--the larger moral and philosophical issues that we will have to wrestle with as lab-grown meats become more mainstream. Those are very real, and deserve their own blog post. But before we can even start to have a serious discussion about those issues, we need to solve the basic question about what names we’ll even use.

First, there’s the big question of what we call the entire category. “Lab meat” or “cultured meat” or “clean meat” are options, and each come with their own set of implications. For example, does “clean meat” mean everything else is “dirty?”

From there, things get more complex. Even among just Memphis Meats and SuperMeat, there will different labeling issues. Both currently use animal serum to grow their lab-cultured meat, but both are also working on methods that don’t require any animal byproduct. Each version will require their own label to give conscientious consumers more informed decisions (and to provide a marketing hook). Then there’s Beyond Meat, which isn’t meat at all but made from pea-protein—but is sold in the meat aisle at the grocery stores.

Now imagine going to the store to buy a burger in a couple of years. Your options will be ground beef from once-alive cows, animal serum-based lab meat, non-animal-serum lab meat, and plant-based patties that “bleed.” One can only imagine how new sub-categories will pop up to match existing labels such as “organic,” “non-GMO,” and “local.”

And that doesn’t even touch on the animal proteins being grown from other animals such as SuperMeat’s chicken and Finless Foods’ lab grown fish.

It’s a lot to think about, and we won’t solve it all here. In fact, it’s a topic I’m sure we’ll be discussing a lot here as new products come to market, names are tested and customers begin to show their preferences.

Personally, I’m excited for the expanded options and can’t wait to try them all. But what do you think? How should new lab-grown meats be labeled? Does the USCA have a legitimate point? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Is Cultured Meat the Future?

Tofu. Seitan. Tempeh. Blech. Current meat substitutes are—how can I say this—disgusting. And we all know that vegan cheezburger tastes nothing like a real burger or real cheese. But as Impossible Foods’ bleeding burger shows us, the landscape is changing rapidly. The next big trend? Cultured meat.

What the heck is cultured meat? Companies across the globe want to make real meat by growing a small tissue biopsy taken from a real animal (without hurting it) into a larger steak or chicken breast. Each has its own unique device to grow the biopsy and plans to market the product to grocery stores, restaurants, and even individual customers around the globe.

Of course, no one has made cultured meat at scale quite yet: They’re all about five years away from a finished product. SuperMeat, an Israeli biotechnology startup, raised over $200,000 and is now at the beginning of its R&D to create cultured chicken meat. Mosa Meat, a Dutch company, is working on ground beef and in 2013 made a single burger that cost more than $300,000 to produce. Meanwhile Memphis Meats, a California-based startup, is making cultured beef and pork and made a few meatballs earlier this year.

The World's First Cell-based Meatball - Memphis Meats

Though we’re pretty far away from an actual usable technology, the concept has deep implications. Vegans and animal rights groups like the idea that animals don’t have to suffer for us to eat meat, and those concerned with sustainability like the idea that we could produce meat without such a high tax on our land, water, and other natural resources.

So what do you think? Would you eat a burger made of cultured meat?