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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cultured meat

Spanish Government Funds BioTech Foods’ Cultured Meat Project

The Spanish government granted BioTech Foods €5.2 million ($6.3 million USD) this week for the company’s cultured meat project. The project will investigate the health benefits of cultured meat, and determine if cultured meat lacks the common health concerns associated with animal meat, such as increasing the risk of high cholesterol and certain cancers.

Like other cultured meat companies, BioTech Foods extracts cells from living animals without causing harm to the animal. The cells are then multiplied in a controlled envrionment. As a result, the multiplied cells become muscle tissue, which can be used to create different meat analogs. BioTech Foods’ cultured meat brand is called Ethicameat, and it appears the brand produces multispecies cultured meat products. The brand’s first prototypes so far include meatballs and a chicken cutlet.

This is not the first time the Spanish government has provided funding for a cultured meat company. During the first week of 2021, the government granted 3D and cultured meat producers, Nova Meat, €250,000 (~$307,500 USD). In the U.S., UC Davis received a $3.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (a government agency) to research cultivated meat and develop methods to amplify stem cells efficiently. With the Singapore government’s regulatory approval of Eat JUST’s first commercial sale of cultured meat, there now seems to be an opportunity for other cultured meat companies to ramp up R&D efforts to get their products to market.

It is currently unclear how long BioTech Foods’ project will take. However, by the end of the project, the company aims to have a cultured meat product containing healthy fats and functional ingredients that is healthier than traditional meat. The positive environmental impacts of cultured meat have often been touted by companies in this space, but the health benefits of cultured meat may also be an important selling point for hesitant consumers.

Aleph Farms’ Cultured Meat Coming to Japan Courtesy of Mitsubishi

Israel-based Aleph Farms announced today that its cultured meat is headed for the Japanese market, thanks to a new Memorandum of Understanding with Mitsubishi.

Through the new deal, Aleph Farms will provide its BioFarm platform to cultivate whole-muscle steaks, while Mitsubishi provides its expertise in biotechnology processes, branded food manufacturing and distribution throughout Japan.

In addition opening up a new market for Aleph Farms, today’s announcement is a nice bit of validation for the company’s BioFarm technology. Announced last November, Aleph says its BioFarm facility will allow it to scale the production of cull cultured cow meat affordably, bringing the price down to parity with factory farmed meat.

But Aleph will face some cell-cultured competition in Japan. Japanese company, Integriculture has its own lab meat technology and was awarded a grant by the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry last year to build out a commercial cell ag facility.

While we’re only in January, the building blocks were put in place last year to make 2021 a breakout year for the technology. Last month, Eat Just made history by making the world’s first sale of cultured meat in Singapore. In Israel, Supermeat opened a test kitchen that offers cell-cultured chicken dishes in exchange for feedback from diners.

Aleph Farms even generated a bit of high-profile news itself last month when Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, did a public tasting of the company’s steak.

Despite all the forward momentum, there are still a number of regulatory issues that need to be designed and implemented for this new technology. With cell cultured meat technology becoming more of a reality, expect a steady stream of announcements in the space throughout the year.

Matrix Meats, Maker of Alt-Meat Scaffolding Tech, Raises Seed Funding

Matrix Meats, a Columbus, Ohio-based maker of proprietary technology for scaffolding used in the creation of cultured meat, has raised a seed funding round according a press release sent to The Spoon.

The round, the amount of which was not disclosed, was led by Unovis Asset Management and, according to the press release, “further supported by CPT Capital, Siddhi Capital, Clear Current Capital and a special purpose vehicle (SPV) led by the Ikove Startup Nursery Fund.”

Ikove’s participation makes sense, as Matrix was born out of a partnership between Ikove Startup Nursery and Nanofiber Solutions. Nanofiber Solutions is the company which created the original process – called electrospinning – which Matrix Meats uses for its scaffolding tech.

Scaffolding, a critical building block in the creation of cultured meat, is used by cultured meat makers in bioreactors to provide a structure around which cells can replicate as they grow. Scaffolding can be made of synthetic or natural materials like plant-based or collagen. Matrix’s electrospinning technology is flexible and can use a variety of materials.

Here’s how Matrix CTO Jed Johnson described the company’s business back in an interview with the Spoon in the summer:

“It’s like the SaaS model, but instead of software as a service, it’s scaffold as a service,” said Johnson, “And we do that because we’re trying to design custom proprietary scaffold for each partner or each customer. Rather than take something off the shelf, like a cytodex bead, which is a standard microcarrier plastic bead that the pharmaceutical world uses, we’re developing custom scaffolds for for each of our partners. That’s because everyone in the culture meatspace is trying to carve out their sort of niche.”

According to the announcement, Matrix is currently working with 14 cultivated meat makers from seven different countries.

“We believe that our technology is an integral part of allowing the cultivated meat market to mature,” said Matrix Meats CEO Eric Jenkusky in the release. “Our innovative and programmable electro-spun nano-fiber scaffolds which replicate the extra cellular matrix of living organisms is backed by 50 awarded and pending patents. We will be expanding our efforts to assist our client/partners with accelerating their path to market.” 

Michelin Star Japanese Chef Launches Startup to Create Cultured Meat

While high-end cuisine is a logical launch point for cultured meat, few expect chefs themselves to start companies that create this form of alternative protein.

But if you’re Chef Shimamura Masaharu of Japan, someone who writes that in high school he wondered whether to “to wear a cook’s lab coat or a scientist’s lab coat,” straddling the two worlds makes perfect sense.

Which is why the chef/owner of Michelin-starred restaurant Unkaku has launched DiverseFarm, a joint venture with cell-ag technology company TissueByNet.

TissueByNet has developed a proprietary technology to make cultured cellular tissue to create lab-grown organs in hospitals, which DiverseFarm hopes to now use to make cultured meat.

TissueByNet’s technology uses what is called spheroids, which are three dimensional spherical globs of cells that get fed into what the company calls Net Molds. Net Molds are containers that allow the tissue to grow without a more traditional scaffolding structure based on biomaterials. The cell culture is placed into the Net Mold with the spheroids culture, where they fuse together and are ready to “harvest” in one to three weeks.

On its website, DiverseFarm shows some examples of what the cell-cultured meat menu selections might look like, listing a variety of mainly cultured duck meat including “Deep-fried Domyoji of cultured duck meat, seasonal bean paste” and “Dashi chazuke of cultured duck meat.”

The news is another illustration of the growing interest in cultured meat in Japan. While Singapore’s been getting lots of attention due to the government’s active catalyzation efforts and milestones like Eat Just’s, startups like Integriculture and Shojinmeat (the news of DiverseFarm was first highlighted via a tweet from Shojinmeat) have captured the imagination of those in this island nation who are interested in increasing food sovereignty.

Restaurants Are Critical to Cultured Meat’s Evolution

This is the Spoon’s weekly restaurant tech wrapup. Sign up today to get the Spoon delivered to your inbox.

This being a newsletter about restaurant tech, I normally spend more time on software and systems than actual food items. Last week, however, the big restaurant tech was the food. 

Eat Just dropped news at the beginning of the week that it had made the world’s first sale of cultured meat (following regulatory approval earlier this month). The buyer? A venue in Singapore called 1880 that’s something of a mix between a restaurant, club, and social enterprise. Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken made its debut at 1880 this past Saturday, Dec. 19, at a launch party.

The news is historic for both Eat Just and cultured meat. But it’s also a major milestone for the restaurant biz, which will play an important role in helping both consumers and regulators understand why we need (underscore that word) to shift to forms of protein that don’t require things like animal slaughter and deforestation to bring into being.

We’ve long known that dropping animal proteins from our food system is one of the most impactful things humans can do when it comes to preserving the planet. More recently, the United Nations pinpointed increased demand for animal protein as a major driver for zoonotic diseases, including COVID-19. It’s hard to summarize the urgency here in a few sentences, but the call to action very clear at this point: change our diets or barrel straight into a future of mass food insecurity, extinct species, regions (including Singapore) completely under water, and the whole collapse of living systems.

The way to express those points is, quite frankly, not through newsletters like this but through culinary experiences that illustrate frightening stuff while simultaneously providing solutions for what could be.

Speaking to me on the phone this week, Eat Just said it chose 1880 as a launch partner because of the venue’s “focus on the future of food” and mission “to build a better planet.” Working together, the two created a menu for the launch of GOOD that essentially brings to life the urgency around finding more sustainable sources of protein.

About 40 people were invited to a four-course meal designed to be a history of our food system, from foraging to farming to melting icecaps. According to materials sent by Eat Just, “Each of course represent[s] an element of the story told through the life of the red junglefowl, the wild ancestor of domesticated chickens, which is found throughout Southeast Asia and is on the ‘endangered’ list in the Red Data Book, an anthology of Singapore natural heritage.” Providing a culinary representation of what the future could be if we stopped relying on animal protein, the meal culminated with three cultured chicken dishes, each one influenced by a top chicken-producing country: Brazil, China, and the U.S.

Importantly, Eat Just’s cultured chicken will also be available for purchase on 1880’s menu moving forward. (Attendees paid for the fourth course cultured chicken dish at the launch, too.) Even more important, the cost of a cultured chicken dish at 1880 will be around $23 USD, which is on par with regular chicken dishes at that venue and at most other upscale restaurants The feasible price point is huge, since reaching price parity with traditional meat is a major requirement for the evolution of cell-based meat from prototype to dietary staple.

Restaurants are essential when it comes to providing (relatively affordable) experiences with cultured meat because they have historically always played a role in the evolution of the what we eat. Consider the hamburger. As a food item, it’s older than the United States by centuries. But it wasn’t until White Castle opened in 1921 and introduced the world to “the slider” that the burger started down the path to ubiquity and eventually became a standard of diets around the world.

That evolution took the better part of a century, which is to say that cultured meat will not come to White Caste or any other QSR tomorrow. It might not even hit those mainstream outlets next year. But as more cultured meat companies like Eat Just gain regulatory approval and provide culinary experiences and education, more consumers, governments, and food producers will start to better understand why we need it, along with other forms of alt protein, in the years to come. The hope of many is that cultured meat will eventually reach every grocery store shelf and dining table from Singapore to Dickson, Tennessee. To get there we need restaurants first. 

Craving a Better Ghost Kitchen Experience

Speaking of upscale dining, this week Crave Hospitality Group announced it had raised $7.3 million in seed funding for its Crave Collective facility in Boise, Idaho. 

Funding for ghost kitchens is definitely not exceptional in 2020. But as we learned recently when Crave took us on a virtual tour of its Boise facility, this company approaches the model a little differently. Food coming out of Crave’s kitchens is not your average burger-in-a-to-go-box fare. Rather, the company has teamed up with James Beard Nominees and Food Network Champions alike to bring a more upscale flair to the virtual restaurant/ghost kitchen experience. The idea is not to replace fine-dining restaurants where culinary creativity is valued above speed and efficiency. Rather, it’s to give these chefs and their restaurants a chance to reinvent their menus and in doing so hopefully survive the apocalyptic collapse of the an entire industry. 

Crave’s funding news this week is a good sign for full-service restaurants, which have struggled more than any other restaurant type during the pandemic. If investors are willing to bank on one upscale concept for ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants, chances are, they’ll fund more of them in the coming months and in doing so save some jobs and culinary experiences in the process.

Restaurant Tech ‘Round the Web 

In a first for the restaurant industry, the National Restaurant Association teamed up with third-party delivery services to release its Public Policy Principles for Third Party Delivery. The framework acts as a guide for lawmakers, offering best practices when it comes to third-party delivery services.

Burger King teamed up with Google this week to let customers search out, order, and pay for Burger King fare via Google Search, Maps, and Pay. More than 5,000 BK restaurants in the U.S. will provide this service.

For the first time ever this week, Shake Shack made delivery available directly via its own digital properties. Customers with the iOS app can order delivery meals directly from the brand, rather than going through a third-party platform. That said, Uber Eats is onboard as the exclusive handler of the last mile for this program.

Eat Just Makes the World’s First Sale of Cultured Meat

A couple short weeks after getting regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore, Eat Just announced last night it has made the first commercial sale of its GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken. 1880, a private restaurant/club and social impact organization in Singapore, will debut the product this Saturday, Dec. 19, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

The GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken product will make its debut in three different dishes, each inspired by a different country: Brazil, China, and the United States. The first diners to taste the dishes will be young people, ages 14 to 18, who “have shown, through their consistent actions, a commitment to building a better planet.”  

The sale to 1880 is not only a first for Eat Just, it’s a first for the cell-based meat industry, which has seen plenty of successful lab prototypes but few opportunities for the public to actually taste the products. Up to now, the latter has been in the form of taste-testing events.

Getting regulatory approval to actually sell cultured meat products advances the entire industry. After all, you can have the tastiest, most environmentally friendly cut of slaughter-free meat out there, but without regulatory approval to sell and distribute it, the product won’t make much of an impact on our global food system. We may be years away from finding a cell-based burger or chicken sandwich in the majority of restaurants around the world, but Eat Just’s news is another significant step in that direction. 

Singapore is a logical place to start. The city-state has been at the forefront of much food tech innovation over the last year, with the Singapore government pouring millions of dollars into its 30×30 initiative aimed at increasing local food production. And since the bulk of Singapore’s meat is currently imported, there’s no “Big Meat” producers and lobbyists pushing back on alt protein the way there is in the U.S.

All that said, I also have an eye on Israel as another important location for the advancement of cultured meat. That country is home to a number of cell-based meat companies, with SuperMeat even opening its own test-kitchen-meets-restaurant initiative in Tel Aviv where guests apply to visit the restaurant and taste the food in exchange for detailed feedback. (Dishes on the menu are not yet for sale.) Additionally, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, recently tasted cell-based meat and wants to establish a national policy for alternative protein.

Eat Just has not yet mentioned locations beyond Singapore where the company will sell its GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken. But given the above, Israel would be an obvious next country for the company to expand both the regulatory approval and sale of its cultured meat products. In the meantime, GOOD Meat Cultured Chicken will be available to 1880 customers over the coming weeks and months.  

The Food Tech Show: Cultured Meat’s Big Month

This week the Spoon editorial team got together to talk about the latest food tech news, including whether or not cultured meat would venture into, well, humans.

We all got grossed out (well, most of us) and decided a Mike Burger is a bad idea. But we did agree the food industry will have to address some of the more ethical questions around cultured meat as the ease and cost to replicate cells comes down over time.

Other (not so gross) stories we discuss on the pod also include:

As always, you can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) or just click play below.

XPRIZE Launches a Four-Year-Long Competition to Improve Alt-Meat

Non-profit XPRIZE today launched a four-year-long competition to transform the global meat industry. Done in partnership with ASPIRE, the project management pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), the XPRIZE Feed the Next Billion competition will foster technological breakthroughs for a more secure food system as we inch towards 2050 and a larger population. Registration is open now, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

The competition was developed in response to XPRIZE’s recently released Future of Food Impact Roadmap, where the organization pinpointed 12 “breakthrough opportunities” that could help build a better food system. Alt-protein is one of those areas. XPRIZE noted today that “the need for alternative proteins at-scale was identified as a critical impact area that requires significant technological advances, decreased price points, and notable shifts in consumers’ preferences – all while maintaining positive health and environmental benefits as compared to animal-based proteins.”

In keeping with that, the Feed the Next Billion Competition will incentivize teams to produce chicken breast and fish fillet alternatives that “replicate or outperform” the real thing in terms of nutrition, environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and taste and texture, according to the competition’s site.

Participants will need to develop multiple consistent cuts of meat alternatives that look, taste, and feel like traditional animal-based meat. All teams will also need to demonstrate the ability to scale production for global distribution. 

The competition comes at a time when the meat and dairy industry account for about 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases and concerns about how to feed a growing world population abound. Alternative proteins, whether plant-based or cultured, have emerged in recent years as a key tool in fighting off the environmental and humanitarian consequences of traditional meat production. There are many routes to alt-protein out there, from Meat-Tech’s 3D-printed cultured beef to the growing list of companies in the $10 million plant-based egg industry. Especially noteworthy recent developments include Eat Just getting the world’s first regulatory approval for cultured meat and Israel’s newly stated goal to develop a national plan for alternative proteins. 

Companies from around the world are invited to register for XPRIZE’s four-year-long competition. Registration will run through April 28, 2021. A total of $15 million will be given to multiple grand prize winners (a specific number of winners was not named) in the first quarter of 2024.

And Now, a Moment for Culture(d Meat)

If you’re doing it right, your Thanksgiving leftovers should be gone by now (so many turkey+stuffing+gravy sandwiches!).

Evidently, preparing for Thanksgiving in the middle of a year-long pandemic was a “logistical nightmare” for BIG TURKEY (Butterball, Perdue, Foster Farms, etc.), thanks to labor shortages and reduced family gatherings.

This got me wondering how long it will be before we see lab-grown, cultured turkey on the tables. Sure, cultured meat still has to overcome issues around scale, affordability and widespread governmental approval. And there are some who doubt whether cultured meat will ever become a thing at all.

But as an industry sector, cultured meat’s march towards our dinner table continues to make gains. Just this week, Eat Just announced today that it received the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured chicken in Singapore. And that’s just the latest development capping off what has been a robust year in the cell cultured meat space that has also featured:

  • Meat-Tech announced that it had successfully 3D-printed a cultured beef fat structure composed of bovine fat cells and bio ink grown from stem cells
  • Future Meat is using fibroblast cells to help bring down the cost of cultured meat
  • SuperMeat opened up a restaurant that serves its cell-based chicken (in exchange for your opinion)
  • NovaMeat started testing its 3D printing technology on cell culture + plant-based meat hybrids
  • BioBQ is developed cell-based brisket
  • Vow is developing a cell-based meat platform portfolio that includes goat, pork and kangaroo
  • BlueNalu announced it’s opening a new production facility next year for its cultured seafood
  • Mosa Meat said it achieved an 80x reduction in medium cost for creating lab-grown meat
  • Higher Steaks created the world’s first lab-grown bacon and pork belly

And that doesn’t even include the Ouroboros Steak art project that designed a kit for creating cell-based human meat. (Relax, it’s not real.) (We hope.)

While 2020 has been a pretty garbage year for the most part, that just hasn’t been the case for cell-based meats. As you can see from the assortment of stories, lot of companies are working on the problem from a lot of different angles, and all of them are making progress.

Now, we won’t be serving lab-grown turkey next year (or, presumably the year after that), but watching all these startups innovate on food tech that could help make food production more abundant and equitable is something to be thankful for.

Upcoming Virtual Events from The Spoon

The Ghost Kitchen Deep Dive – December 9th – An all day event looking at the fast-changing ghost kitchen & virtual restaurant market.

Food Tech Live 2021 – January 11th – Check out the latest food tech innovation to start 2021 at our annual food tech product showcase.

Tetra’s Tiny Dishwasher (Finally) Headed to Market

Heatworks’ Tetra countertop dishwasher is an example of a product that I totally don’t need and yet totally want.

We first covered the Tetra back at CES 2018, where we were enthralled by the diminutive dishwasher that could clean a few settings of dishes with only a half gallon of water in ten minutes. Fun!

Well, things have been quiet on the Tetra front since that CES and we were wondering if the device would ever actually make it to market. Turns out, the company was trying to solve the complex issue around soap dispensing in its machine.

This week, Heatworks announced that it has partnered with BASF to make that complicated mechanism and bring the Tetra to market. According to the press announcement, the improved Tetra “will be designed to deliver custom solutions and dosing, dependent on the selected wash cycle, ensuring each cleaning cycle is optimized. Tetra’s cartridges will last for multiple loads and consumers will be able to sign up for a subscription, so that cartridges are shipped to them automatically.”

That last part about a proprietary soap cartridge is a bit of a bummer. We’re not a big fan of Keurig-style solutions that lock you into a particular ecosystem. But we are happy to see that the Tetra is still alive and expected to be available in the back half of 2021.

Blendid.com, Jamba Juice, Walmart, AI, Robot, Smoothy, Kiosk, Dixon, Ca, 111220

More Headlines

Exclusive: Blendid and Jamba Co-Brand New Smoothie Robot – The robot is now open for business at a Walmart in Dixon, California. This is the first co-branded robot from Blendid and its second to open up at a Walmart.

Zuul Teams Up With Thrillist to Launch Rotating Ghost Kitchen – A series of 10 different NYC restaurants will each hold a two-week residency offering exclusive delivery-only meal offerings made out of Zuul’s ghost kitchen facility in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood.

The Spoon’s Plant-Based Egg Round-Up – Plant-based eggs are poised to become the next big thing in the plant-based space, and it can be hard to keep up with all of the companies involved in this industry. We’ve pulled together some of the emerging and bigger players in this space.

3D Meat Printing Startup SavorEat Goes Public – The Israeli startup has had an initial public offering (IPO) on Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE), raising NIS 42.6 million ($13 million) in funding.

HungryPanda Raises $70M to Provide Food Delivery to Overseas Chinese Customers – The London, U.K.-based company will use the new funds to continue its global expansion, delivering authentic Chinese restaurant food and groceries to Chinese people living abroad.

Eat Just Gets the World’s First Regulatory Approval to Sell Cultured Meat

In a first for cultured meat, Eat Just has received regulatory approval to sell its cell-based chicken product. The company, best known at this point for its plant-based egg products, announced last night that its cultured chicken product has been approved for sale in Singapore as an ingredient in chicken bites. Other cultured chicken products are planned for the future.

According to a press release sent to The Spoon, this approval deems Eat Just’s cell-based chicken as “safe for human consumption.” To achieve this, and to the demonstrate safety and quality of its end product, the company spent months documenting its proprietary process for making cell-based chicken. An analysis included information on the identity and purity of the chicken cells, the full manufacturing process, as well as the nutritional components of the end product. 

Eat Just worked with the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), Singapore’s regulatory authority for food safety. The company said it has also struck deals with “well-established local manufacturers” to finish the product before it goes out to restaurants.

Heading into restaurants first is in keeping with Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick’s timeline for cell-based meat, which he outlined for us at this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit. Cell-based meat companies don’t simply jump from a successful prototype in the lab to mass commercialization. Rather, there are a number of stops along the way, the first of which is to get the prototype out of the lab and into a place like a restaurant. However, the journey for cell-based meats as they evolve from prototype stage will be lengthy: Tetrick put the timeline “somewhere north of 15 years” for when the buying public will find cell-based meats as ubiquitous as, say Coca-Cola products.

Getting regulatory approval is paramount to commercializing cell-based meat, so today’s news marks a significant milestone not only for Eat Just but for the entire cell-based meat sector, which has seen an astounding amount of investment over the last several months. 

Commenting on Eat Just’s milestone, Good Food Institute Executive Director Bruce Friedrich said, “Cultivated meat will mark an enormous advance in our efforts to create a food supply that is safe, secure, and sustainable, and Singapore is leading the way on this transition.”

The regulatory approval will allow Eat Just to launch its forthcoming GOOD Meat brand in Singapore, the details of which are forthcoming at a later date.

Meat-Tech Says it has 3D Printed Cultured Beef Fat Structure

Meat-Tech, a publicly traded (TASE: MEAT) Israel-based cultured meat company, announced today that for the first time it successfully 3D-printed a cultured beef fat structure composed of bovine fat cells and bio ink.

The bovine fat cells and bio ink were created from stem cells in Meat-Tech’s labs. Meat-Tech says its edible bio ink helps “create an accurate, digitally-printed structure by supporting 3D printed cells.” The edible structure Meat-Tech announced today reached a height of 10 mm, which is larger than previous versions of 3D-printed meat the company has produced.

Meat-Tech’s milestone comes on the heels of news earlier this month that the company had closed a $7 million round of funding and had started the process of filing for an IPO in the U.S.

The 3D-printed cultured meat space has certainly heated up in the past few months. Fellow Israeli company SavorEats announced just today that it had raised $13 million by going public on Israel’s stock exchange (where Meat-Tech is also traded). And at our Smart Kitchen Summit in October, Spanish startup NovaMeat revealed that it has been 3D-printing hybrid cell-and plant-based meats.

There is still some debate around the efficacy of cultured meat as a whole. Pat Brown, CEO of Impossible Foods thinks that mass market cultured meat never going to happen. But that is not stopping the startups looking to prove the un-cultured wrong. Future Meat is looking to bring costs down by using fibroblast cells as its starter cells. Super Meat launched a restaurant that serves its cell-based chicken meat. And Eat Just, which is also developing cell-based meats, expects it will take 15 years before cultured meat to reach the “Coca-Cola phase” of ubiquity.

There is still a lot to happen for cultured meat to move from the lab to our dining tables including technology, scaling and even governmental regulation. But announcements like the one from Meat-Tech today show that slaughter-free meat is getting closer to reality.

Future Meat is cutting costs on mass production with an unlikely cellular approach

Founded in 2018, Future Meat stayed under the radar until last fall when their Series A funding round raised $14 million—including a sizable investment from Tyson Ventures. Now, just two years in, the Israeli start-up is expecting a major scale up in early 2021 and is optimistic about being among the first to gain FDA approval thanks to an uncommon cellular approach.

Commercial scale has been Future Meat’s priority from the start. “We know we can [culture meat]. The question is how much will it cost,” said Yaakov Nahmias, Future Meat Chief Scientific Officer told me in an interview earlier this month. “Do you really want to make a $25,000 steak?”

Key to its plan to ramp up biomass and cut costs, is a unique choice of starter cells. While most cultured meat start-ups rely on some form of stem or muscle cell, the basic building block of Future Meat’s products is the cell-type that makes up your connective tissue: fibroblasts.

“These are the cells that every time you get cut, they close that cut very fast,” according to Nahmias, who developed the fibroblast technology in his university lab.  

Stem cells are a popular candidate for cell culture because they can become any type of cell, but growing and maintaining them is very expensive, Nahimas said. “They’re what we call phenotypically unstable.” Meaning, stem cells don’t stay stem cells for long. In nature, they’re meant to be stem cells for a day or less before transforming into another cell type. To harness their potential or stabilize stem cells, many start-ups rely on gene editing, a method that Future Meat is avoiding. 

Fibroblasts, on the other hand, are phenotypically stable making them less volatile and easier to grow in mass quantities. And Future Meat has an extensive patent portfolio protecting the way they grow and direct these fibroblasts. They can accelerate a natural process called spontaneous immortalization where the cells DNA rearranges so that it can divide forever. And “by adding some food grade molecules” to the cellular medium they can pressure “the fibroblast to become fat cells or muscle cells,” Nahmias said.

Another key advantage of these connective tissue cells is that Future Meat can grow them in suspension, they don’t require surfaces to cling to. Many other mammalian cells, like muscle cells (myocytes), need something to hold on to, a sort of scaffolding, when cultured.  Culturing in suspension means no need for scaffolding and it significantly increases the biomass that can be cultivated in a single bioreactor. According to Kate Krueger, alternative protein consultant at Helikon Consulting, “Suspension cell culture has a lot of promise in reducing cost of manufacture.”

Today, Future Meat  bioreactor systems can reach yields of 33 percent, converting a third of their volume to mass every two weeks. “It’s possible to grow the mass of 100 chickens every two weeks in a bioreactor the size of a standard refrigerator,” Nahmias said. They’re also working on a hybrid product, a combination of plant protein and bioreactor-grown fat cells that they can produce at two tons per week. By the second quarter of next year they expect peak capacity to increase to half a ton every two weeks and for that to triple again by the end of 2021. 

For now Future Meat is all about getting to scale, market and a reasonable price point to validate their process and prove their tech. But the end-game for Future Meat is about developing a platform—think of it as the AWS of cultured meat. And the target customer isn’t just a new meat industry, it’s the old one. 

The idea is to integrate their technology into the existing supply chain. Even individual farmers looking to diversify could include a bioreactor as part of their operations, Nahmias said. But he expects involvement from meat and ingredient giants like Tyson and Cargill will be what finally catapults cultured meat into the mainstream. Future Meats’ game plan is to have the approved and affordable tech ready and waiting. “Because once it happens,” he said, “it’s going to move quickly.”