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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cultured meat

Jim Mellon Has Done the Math and Thinks Cultured Meat Could Hit Price Parity in 5 Years

While some future food leaders like Pat Brown don’t believe the economics of cultured meat make sense, longtime investor and entrepreneur Jim Mellon thinks exactly the opposite.

In fact, Mellon thinks that in the future, cultured meat will be more affordable than both factory farmed and the plant-based alternatives.

“The price of plant-based foods has been coming down – Impossible has just lowered its price by 20% in the US – but there is a limit to that,” said Mellon, whom I recently interviewed for The Food Tech Show podcast. “I think you’ll get parity [with traditionally produced meat], possibly in 18 months time, with some of the plant based foods. But I don’t think it’s going to go a lot below that.”

In contrast, Mellon believes meat made via cellular agriculture will eventually be more affordable than that of farmed meat prices.

“At scale, and we’ve got a pretty good scientific advisory board, we think that it will be 2.5 milliliters [of stem cell material] from a cow will produce the equivalent of seven or eight cows worth of meat in 40 days,” said Mellon. “So if you can do this in 40 days, we think the input costs will be 2.5 to one. And that compares to as you all know, a cow twenty five to one, a chicken nine to one.”

In short, Mellon believes the raising of animals through traditional farming is hugely inefficient. By moving meat production to cellular agriculture – or what will essentially meat brewed in a bioreactor – Mellon believes we’ll see what is effectively a 10x increase in efficiency.

So when does he think we’ll see pricing drop to parity with traditionally farmed meat? Sooner than most think.

“In the US, 60% of your meat is bought in the form of ground meat, sausages, patties, etc. I think we’ll be at price parity within five years,” said Mellon. “Five years is not a long time in the history of mankind. Within five years, the whole of the intensive farming industry will face a very dramatic threat to its existence.”

Mellon’s understanding of the cultured meat space was shaped in part by his conversations with many of the early leaders in the market, which he talked to for his new book, Moo’s Law: An Investor’s Guide to the New Agrarian Revolution. I suggest you check it out, but before you do that you can listen to my full conversation with Mellon for the Food Tech Show via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or by clicking play below.

CellMEAT Raised $4.5M in Pre-Series A Round of Funding for its Cultured Meat Tech

South Korean cultured meat startup CellMEAT raised a $4.5 million Pre-Series A round of funding at the end of last month (hat tip to Green Queen). The round was led by Korea-based NAU IB Capital, with participation from BNK Venture Capital, DT & Investment, Ryu Kyung PSG Asset Management, JNU Holdings, Yonsei Technology Holdings, and U.S.-based Knollwood Investment Advisory, as well as existing investors Strong Ventures, Primer Sazze Partners, and Primer.

Founded in 2019, CellMEAT’s cultured meat technology involves an original cell culturing medium that acts as an alternative to the controversial fetal bovine serum. The company said that this round of funding will go towards continued research and development to bring production costs down and accelerate scaling to mass production. CellMEAT has R&D center in the cities of Gwangju at the Cheonnam National University and Seoul at Ewha Womans University’s Mokdong Hospital.

We are only two months in to 2021, and already investment in cultured meat startups is downright frothy. CellulaREvolution raised $1.37 million, BlueNalu raised $60 million, New Age Meats added another $2 million to its coffers, Vow Foods raised $6 million, Mirai Foods raised $2.4 million, and Future Meat raised $26.75 million.

There are still a number of hurdles before cultured meat can go mainstream, however. Chief among them, the price to create cultured meat needs to come way down. Mosa Meats, which just closed an $85 million Series B round this week, famously made a $325,000 cultured meat burger back in 2013. The price for Mosa’s meats has dropped 80x since then, thanks in large part to the elimination of fetal bovine serum in its process.

Thankfully, as you can see, there are a number of startups, including CellMEAT that are working on that issue.

Mosa Meat Closes $85M Series B Round

Mosa Meat announced today it has raised $10 million in a third and final closing of its Series B round, bringing the round’s total to $85 million. Nutreco and Just Eat Takeaway.com CEO Jitse Groen participated in the third closing, while the entire B round was led by Blue Horizon Ventures.

The closing follows a $55 million fundraise in September 2020, which was also part of the Series B round. The company’s total funding to date is $96 million.

Netherlands-based Mosa Meat is credited with having created the world’s first lab-grown hamburger back in 2013 to the tune of $325,000 in production costs for that single burger. The company brought that number significantly down last year when it achieved an 80x reduction in the cost of their product’s growth medium, which is typically the most expensive part of the cell-based meat-making process. A big part of this reduced cost was removing the use of fetal bovine serum (FBS), the expensive and highly controversial growth medium from which many cell-based meat companies are now distancing themselves.

The funds from Mosa’s Series B round will go towards extending the company’s pilot production facility in Maastricht, Netherlands, as well as towards developing “an industrial-sized production line” and building out the Mosa Meat team.

 The end goal, of course, is to get its meat products to customers. No date has yet been announced for that. Currently, the company is working with European regulators to demonstrate the safety of cell-based meat and get regulatory approval.

Mosa’s Series B round is the latest development in what has already been a busy year in the world of cell-based meat investments. In February alone, Israel’s Future Meat raised $26.75 million, New Age Meats extended its seed round by $2 million, and Redefine meat closed a $29 million Series A round.  

New Age Meats Raises Another $2M Seed Extension Round for ‘Hybrid’ Meat

Berkley, California-based New Age Meats (NAM) has raised another $2 million seed extension round following a previous extension of the same amount last year.

This round was led by “a very large, significant industry player” in Asia that must remain confidential, NAM said in a press release. The round also included participation from Litani Ventures’ Peter Rahal, ff VC, SOSV, and Innovating Capital, as well as new investments by San Diego Tech Coast Angels, BeniVC, Oceanic Partners, Deep Ventures, and Climate Capital.

NAM, a graduate of the IndieBio accelerator program, is currently developing what the company calls “hybrid cultivated and plant-based meat” that for now includes pork sausages and dumplings. Its current process is to grow meat from cells collected from the animal, then adds plant-based elements for additional taste, texture, and nutritional profile.

The blended approach to cultured meat is arguably one that can both get companies’ products to market faster and help them reach price parity with traditional meat products. Another company, Israel-based Future Meat, also uses this tactic, and in a recent interview with The Spoon, CEO Rom Kshuk called it “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to price parity and scalability. 

NAM’s own CEO, Brian Spears, said in a statement today that his company is “relentlessly focused” on driving down costs and scaling production. “Ultimately, we will fail if our products are too expensive and low volume to be served anywhere but luxury restaurants,” he said.

This new funding will allow NAM to continue building up its team, which includes former staffers from Impossible Foods. The company is also preparing for a Series A round “in the coming months,” though no detailed timeframe was given.

NAM has raised a total of $7 million to date.

Aleph Farms Makes a Cultivated 3D-Bioprinted Ribeye Steak

Israel-based startup Aleph Farms and its research partner, the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering at the Israel Institute of Technology, said today that they have developed a cultivated 3D-bioprinted ribeye steak. The steak contains muscle, fat, and structure identical to what would be found in a steak from a cow, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

To create the cultivated ribeye steak, a technique called 3D bioprinting was used. This is different from 3D printing because living cells, which have been extracted from living animals, are actually printed. Once the living cells are printed, they are incubated to grow and interact to form tissues and structures identical to those found in a steak from an animal. Other companies that use 3D printing to produce meat alternatives, like NovaMeat and Redefine Meat, print plant-based proteins and fats.

In 2018, Aleph Farms unveiled a cultivated thin-cut steak. At the time, the steak was not produced using 3D bioprinting, and Aleph Farms was limited to making its first product just a few inches long and a few centimeters thick. At the end of last year, the company shared that it had created a platform for the commercial production of its cultured meat, called BioFarm, which the company hopes to have fully operational by 2022.

It is still early into 2021, and in addition to Aleph Farms’ news, there has already been a plethora of cultured meat news. At the end of January, NovaMeat announced that it had created the world’s largest piece of 3D-printed cultivated meat. Mirai Foods raised $2.7 million a few weeks ago to accelerate the commercialization of its cultured meat. Eat Just made headlines at the end of last year with its first commercial sale of cultured meat.

Aleph Farms says now that it has successfully created an entire steak it can essentially create any shape and type of steak. In the press release, the company shared that it will continue to expand its portfolio of cultivated meat products.

PitchBook: Food Tech Companies Raised $4B in Q4 2020

Food Tech remained an attractive target for venture capital during the last quarter of 2020. According to data from PitchBook released last week, food tech companies raised a total of $4 billion during the quarter.

According to PitchBook, the pandemic spurred much of the continued investment in the food tech space as consumers adopted new behaviors around online grocery shopping as well as restaurant takeout and home delivery.

The strong finish to the year in food tech investment is not that surprising, given previous financial tracking. Last November, a report from Finestere Ventures, using PitchBook’s data, found that $8.37 billion had been invested in food tech companies throughout the first three quarters of 2020.

Other findings from PitchBook’s Q4 report include:

  • Lab-grown meat companies raised more than $383 million in 2020
  • Funding for cultivated agriculture companies hit a record $1.6 billion in 2020. Investment in that space is expected to accelerate this year.
  • Increasing consumer demand for plant-based meat and dairy is expected to create annual growth rates in that sector of around 20 percent and revenues of around $3.3 billion in the U.S.
  • Retailers have responded to the surge in online grocery with investments in technology that will, in turn, spur further e-commerce adoption.

These are all trends that we’ve been watching closely here at The Spoon. Cultured meat in particular has already seen a flurry of activity already in Q1 of this year. CellulaREvolution, Future Meat and Mirai Foods have all raised funding over the past month and a half. With Singapore having become the first country to approve the sale of cultured meat, expect more regulatory dominoes to fall and more investment in the space.

Podcast: BlueNalu CEO on Building a Cell-Based Fish Tech Company

As a long-time food industry exec, BlueNalu President and CEO Lou Cooperhouse knew there were established food industry techniques his company could borrow from when building cell-based seafood.

“It’s a much bigger toolbox,” said Cooperhouse. “You can embrace some of the technologies that industry uses, and create a product that absolutely can meet the sensory expectations and experiences of fish, which will be much more challenging on the meat side.”

One of the tools from the food industry toolbox, according to Cooperhouse, is layering.

“The concept of layering plays itself very nicely with the food industry,” said Cooperhouse. “There’s extrusion technologies, there’s folding technologies and there’s lamination technologies like in packaging.”

But while BlueNalu was able to leverage some of the technologies and processes from the food industry, the company had a much smaller set of knowledge to borrow from when it comes to replicating fish cells. That’s because the vast majority of work in the cell-based meat space has been done with mammal cells, while fish cell replication for human consumption was largely unchartered waters.

“There was little to no intellectual property around anybody ever growing and propagating successfully stable cell lines of fish,” said Cooperhouse. “So we began with a clean piece of paper on the technology side.”

And so BlueNalu set about to build a set of IP to create cell-based fish products, which Cooperhouse describes as an “end game” of a “product that has the same nutritional, functional, and sensory characteristics as seafood.”

Three years later, the company is ready to move to pilot production with the goal of creating up to 500 pounds of fish per week in its new pilot production plant it has started building in San Diego.

If you want to hear about Lou’s story and how he went from concept to pilot production of cell-based seafood, you won’t want to miss this podcast. You can hear my full conversation with Lou Cooperhouse, and all of our podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or by clicking play below.

CellulaREvolution Raises £1M for its Continuous Cell Culture Technology

CellulaREvolution, a UK-based cell culturing startup, announced this week that it has raised a £1 million (~$1.37M USD) round of funding. Investors include CPT Capital, Stephan Schmidt, Orange Light Ventures, Northstar Ventures, North East Innovation Funds and the newly launched Northern Accelerator Seed Investment Fund (NASIF).

Founded in 2019, CellulaREvolution was spun off from Newcastle University. According to the company’s website, it is developing two main products that have applications in the creation of cell-cultured meat and in the therapeutics world:

  1. A synthetic peptide coating that allows for serum-free cell culturing. This, the company says will make it possible to eliminate animal-derived serum from the culturing process.
  2. A bioreactor that can continuously produce cells in a serum free environment in much smaller footprint. CellulaREvolution estimates that “1m2 of continuous cell production would require about 7000m2 when using traditional production processes. E.g. 1m2 versus a football pitch.”

Because of its technology, CellulaREvolution says that it can make cell-culturing more efficient and affordable. Getting the price of cell-cultured meat down is critical before it can get any mainstream acceptance.

Thankfully, there are a number of startups tackling the issue of cultured meat affordability. Just this week, Future Meat announced that it had raised $26.75 million and brought the price of its hybrid cell/plant-based chicken down to $7.50 per quarter pound to produce. And last month, Cultured Biosciences announced its cloud bioreactors have proven their capabilities of high-throughput mammalian cell cultures, which could help cultured meat startups achieve scale. Cell cultured meat startups Mirai and Vow have also raised funding this year.

The cultured meat space is downright frothy so far this year and it’s only February. Look for even more breakthroughs and funding news in the weeks to come.

TurtleTree Scientific and Dyadic to Develop Affordable Growth Factors for Cell-Based Proteins at Scale

TurtleTree Scientific, the recently launched B2B unit of TurtleTree Labs that develops growth factors for cellular ag, today announced a “fully funded” collaboration with biotech company Dyadic International. Through this partnership, the two will develop recombinant food-grade growth factors for proteins that can be grown in high yields at lower costs in bioreactors. This could allow TurtleTree, which makes cell-cultured products (including human breastmilk) to scale up and get to market faster, paving the way for cultured meat and dairy companies to do the same.

Dyadic is known for its its C1 gene expression based on the Thermothelomyces heterothallica fungus. Via this platform, Dyadic can produce recombinant proteins at an industrial scale of up to 500,000 liters, with lower capital and operating expenditures than what cultured meat companies would normally find. The company’s tech has been used by some of the world’s most well-known biotech companies, including DuPont and BASF.

In a statement, TurtleTree cofounder and Chief Strategist Max Rye said that manufacturing human growth factors both at scale and at an affordable cost has been a major challenge, and that the partnership with Dyadic will help the company “overcome this hurdle” safely and efficiently.

Growth factors account for the bulk of the cost in cell-based protein production — 55 to 95 percent, by some accounts. Part of the reason for this, TurtleTree explained last month, is that cell culture media components have been developed for non-food areas like research and theraputics, which do not have the same scale requirements and cost constraints as food and agriculture production.

Ronen Tchelet, PhD, Dyadic’s Vice President of Research and Business Development, said in today’s press release that the company will engineer “hyper-productive” C1 cel lines to develop high bioactivity and yields suitable for commercial-scale productions. This will not only accelerate the timeline for TurtleTree’s business, it could also, according to Rye, “make cellular agriculture a reality for all” by enabling food-grade growth factors at an affordable price point to the wider cellular ag industry.

Future Meat’s CEO on Price Parity, Cultured Chicken in the U.S. and Raising $26.75M

Future Meat Technologies announced today it has brought the production cost of its cultured chicken breast product to under $10. The company has also raised an additional $26.75 million in capital to scale up production and get its product into market in the next 12 to 18 months.

Reaching cost parity with traditional meat is a vital step in the process of bringing cultured meat to the wider public. Speaking via a video chat today, Future Meat CEO Rom Kshuk said that getting to price parity with traditional meat has been part of his company’s mission statement from the start. Future Meat, he said has been able to “decrease cost by 1,000 times over the last three years.” As of now, a quarter-pound serving of its cultured chicken breast costs just $7.50 to produce.

Future Meat differs from many alt-protein companies in that it uses a blend of cultured and plant-based ingredients for its products, rather than choosing one or the other, as most companies do. This, Kshuk explained, is something of a “low-hanging fruit” approach since companies can typically get to market faster with a blended product as opposed to developing one that is 100 percent cultured. Kshuk said that right now, Future Meat will “use the best of both worlds” where these two approaches are concerned, though that balance will skew more towards exclusively cultured meat products in future.

For plant-based proteins, the company uses a mixture of the leading products on the market (soy, pea, fungi). Plant-based protein tends to provide a better texture and nutritional profile to food items than cultured protein, which is one advantage to using the former. However, the plant-based approach comes up lacking in terms of what Kshuk calls “the sensory experience” of the meat: flavor, aroma, etc. Those are elements cultured meat is better able to provide, for now at least.

At the moment, Future Meat is focused on scaling up its production, planning its approach to market, and trying to get a team on the ground in the U.S. It plans to launch in the U.S. by 2022. Initially, that will likely happen through two channels: restaurants and direct-to-consumer sales. The latter could be an especially lucrative format, given the rise in D2C commerce brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The recent fundraise will bolster all of these efforts. The $26.75 million funding round is a convertible note with participation from new investors that include German dairy producer Müller Group, ADM Capital, and CPG Rich Products Corp. Existing investors Tyson Foods, Archer Daniels Midland, S2G Ventures, Manta Ray Investors, Emerald Technology Ventures, and Bits x Bites participated, too. 

Future meat expects its pilot facility to start production in the first half of 2021 and is also seeking regulatory approval in multiple territories. 

Here’s Why Future Cattle Farmers and Fishermen May Work at an Office Park or Abandoned Mall

As more and more companies in the cell-based meat space migrate from prototype to full pilot production phase, one of the questions that we need to start thinking about is how exactly all this meat will be made at scale.

Sure, scaled production is likely 10 years out for many of these companies, but the reality is re-configuring an industry as big and significant as meat, poultry or fish production will be a herculean task, so it’s worth starting the conversation now.

One of the futuristic visions I keep hearing about is the idea of “meat breweries“, where buildings host giant bioreactors that grow cultured meat.

It’s a weird concept now, but in fifteen years time there’s a good chance we’ll need meat breweries sprinkled throughout the country (and globe) if we plan to get anywhere near the volume of production where cell-based meat can account for 35% of all meat consumed predicted by consulting firm AT Kearney by 2045.

If we’re going to use the brewery concept as a model to frame the conversation, it’s worth comparing the idea of meat “brewing” to that of traditional beer brewing market and ask: will meat breweries be something akin to big high-production beer breweries like those of Anheuser-Busch, producing a bunch of meat centrally and shipping around the country?

Or, alternatively, will meat brewing be something closer to the microbrewery model where meat is made city-by-city for consumption within a hundred mile radius?

My best guess based on conversations with early entrepreneurs in this space is the meat-brewing production model will be much closer to how one makes my favorite local IPA to than, say, Budweiser. In other words: There will be lots of meat breweries around the country and around the world, producing cell-based meat to be consumed locally.

So where will these meat breweries be built? The reality is that while cell-based meat production can certainly be done in a building built on farmland (and I definitely think livestock farmers should consider such a thing), the reality is that meat brewing can and will be done just about anywhere where there is space. Space like in old factories, warehouses, empty office parks and even restaurants. Just as with today’s brewpubs, you can even envision some restaurants that make their meat on site in the future.

And then there’s empty shopping malls and abandoned retail spaces. Retail real estate demand is shrinking quickly and likely won’t come back as more people buy online and work remotely. We’ve already seen some empty retail locations turned into vertical farms, so why not think about turning these spaces into the meat farms of the future?

No matter where we decide to put these future cell-based meat, poultry and fish production facilities, chances are we will need a lot of them. Those developers, entrepreneurs and city planners that start envisioning a future now that includes distributed cell-based meat production could help us usher in the cultured meat farmers and fishermen of the future.

Mirai Foods Raises $2.1M CHF for Commercialization of Cultured Meat

Switzerland-based Mirai Foods, announced this week that it has raised $2.1M CHF (~$2.4 million USD) in funding in its initial Seed round (hat tip to FoodBev Media). The round included participation from seven investors in total, including the Pauling Group and Team Europe.

This most recent round of funding will be used to accelerate the commercialization of Mirai Foods’ cultured meat products. The company was founded one year ago, and after six months produced its first cultured meat prototype. Currently, the company is focused on creating cultured beef products, like minced beef, but will eventually work on other meat analogs as well.

Like other cultured meat companies, Mirai Foods extracts stem cells from living animals to produce its cultured meat. However, no animals are slaughtered or harmed in the process, and the extracted cells are grown outside of animals in large bioreactors. Because living animals are not raised by the company, there is no need for land, feed, or water for animals, thus resulting in the cultured meat product having a lower carbon footprint. According to its press announcement, Mirai is the only cultivated meat player in Switzerland. The company says it differentiates itself from other players in the space in that it does not genetically manipulate their cells but keep the cells as they naturally occur in the animal.

Mirai Foods is not the only company racing to accelerate its commercialization efforts in hopes of bringing cultured meat to market. At the very beginning of 2021, Aleph Farms actually announced that it would be bringing its lab-grown whole-muscle steak to Japan, and will be releasing a limited launch of its products in Asia in 2022. IntegriCulture aims to launch a cultured liver product in restaurants this year, and SuperMeat has a test kitchen/restaurant in Tel-Aviv, Israel dedicated to sampling its cultured chicken to consumers in exchange for feedback.

Lab-grown meat, as science fiction-y and futuristic as it sounds, is inching closer to popping up on restaurant menus and retailer shelves. Regulatory approval from governments is still a barrier that cultured meat companies must cross, but approval could come sooner than later after the Singapore government’s approval of Eat Just’s cultured meat. Mirai Foods has not announced when it aims on launching its cultured meat in the market but did say in its press release that it is focused on bringing cell-based meat to the market as quickly and safely as possible.