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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cultured meat

Aleph Farms Debuts Commercial Production Platform for Cultivated Steak, Starts Construction of Its ‘BioFarm’

Today, Aleph Farms announced a platform for the commercial production of its cultivated beef steak. The company says this platform will allow it to eventually produce meat grown from cells of a living cow affordably at scale, putting its cultivated steak at price parity with factory farmed meat.

The new production process is the first part of a phased build-out of what Aleph Farms is calling its BioFarm, a pilot plant the company intends to have fully operational by 2022.

“One of the big challenges of cultivated meat is the ability to produce large quantities efficiently at a cost that can compete with conventional meat industry pricing, without compromising on quality,” said Didier Toubia, Co-Founder and CEO of Aleph Farms, in today’s press release. “We have developed five technological building blocks unique to Aleph Farms that are put into a large-scale production process, all patented by the company.”

The company has created a prototype of beef steak produced through its new commercial production platform and will debut it via a virtual cooking demonstration at the Agri-Food Innovation Summit on November 20th.

With its new process, Aleph says it is trying to emulate the tissue regeneration process of meat produced through traditional animal farming, only outside of the animal’s body and under controlled conditions. The company also is growing whole meat (rather than minced) by using a plant-based matrix that mimics that extra-cellular matrix founds in animals.

This announcement is another indication of how the cultivated meat market is transitioning into a new phase as companies like Aleph and Matrix Meats lay the groundwork for a more scaled production of cultivated meat produced from animal cells. This development of lower-cost production is a necessary step if lab-grown meat is to ever to become a widely consumed alternative to traditional, animal-farmed meat products.

While some skeptics like Pat Brown say that these companies will never be able to get production to the point where prices will be at parity with traditional meat, others, like Josh Tetrick, say that day will definitely come, even if it takes us a decade or more before we’re buying a piece of cultivated meat at the local fast food joint.

And with today’s news by Aleph, it looks like we may have taken another step forward towards into a more sustainable, alt-protein future.

Meat-Tech 3D Closes $7M Funding Round, Files for IPO

Israeli food tech company Meat-Tech 3D officially announced yesterday that it had closed a $7 million funding round for its cultured meat production technologies that integrate 3D printing. The round was led by Psagot Provident and Pension Funds with participation from the Mor investment house as well as private investors.

The funding announcement comes about one week after Meat-Tech 3D said it had started the process for an IPO in the U.S. (The company is traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange already.)

At this point, Meat-Tech 3D is more focused on the B2B realm, with plans to license its technology — a combination of cell-cultured meat processing and 3D printing — to alt-meat producers, rather than creating its own line of products. 

That technology and process involves growing cells in bioreactors then turning the different cell types (e.g., muscle, fat) into inks that get bioprinted to mimic a specific cut of meat. The 3D-printed structures are then placed in incubators where they grow before being frozen and packaged for shipping. The company successfully printed a piece of beef via this method.

Scale, however, is what Meat-Tech 3D ultimately wants to achieve. And as we’ve discussed before, there’s a long trek towards cultured meat at scale, and a big difference between a successful prototype and having an actual product widely available.

Meat-Tech isn’t the only cell-based meat company using 3D printing. At the recent Smart Kitchen Summit, NovaMeat showed off it’s 3D printer by making a “steak” live during the show. And earlier this year, Redefine Meat said it had achieved the ability to 3D print plant-based steaks using industrial-level technology.

Meat-Tech CEO Sharon Fima said in today’s press release that the new funds will enable the company to progress with its acquisition of cultured meat company Peace of Meat as well as continuing to build out R&D.

The company has not yet provided a timeframe for the IPO. 

Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick on the 4 Phases of Bringing Cell-Based Meat to the Masses

When will cell-based meat be available to the masses?

It depends on who you ask. At one SKS 2020 panel this week, participants said maybe 10 years. In another, Impossible CEO Pat Brown more or less said never.

Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Eat Just, reckons the timeline is “somewhere north of 15 years.” 

Eat Just, which is best known at this point for its plant-based egg products, is in the process of developing its own cell-based meats, including chicken nuggets and chicken breast. The north-of-15-years timeframe for those and other cell-based meat products comes from an important factor Tetrick pointed out when we chatted this week at SKS: that a successful prototype in a lab does not automatically equal commercial success. 

A lot must happen in between those two endpoints, prototype and commercialization, and during our talk, Tetrick broke the journey down into four distinct phases. These are as applicable to other food businesses as they are to Eat Just.

The first is getting that prototype out of the lab. Launching in a single restaurant is one example. To do this, companies need to have not only developed a prototype, they must also have gotten regulatory approval for their product. Tetrick told me that Eat Just hopes this step happens for his company this year or next.

The second phase moves companies out from a single location and into some restaurants, say 50–100, and perhaps smaller retailers. At the moment, there are no cell-based meat companies with products at this stage.

Phase three is even further off. That’s the point when a company’s products are on food retail shelves across the country, from Whole Foods in San Francisco to Walmart in Dyersburg, Tennessee. Eat Just is currently at this point with its plant-based egg products, which are in more than 17,000 locations in the U.S.

That final phase is what Tetrick calls “the Coca-Cola phase.” The product is available everywhere and at a low cost. He believes this is “the phase that will transform the planet,” meaning it will curb the larger population’s reliance on animal protein. To get to that kind of world, phase four is ultimately where Eat Just and other companies need to be.

Not that getting there will be easy. Tetrick doesn’t agree with Pat Brown’s statement that cell-based meat “is never going to be a thing,” but he does concede that it’s no easy feat. In fact, he equated the process from prototype to ubiquity with scaling a really tall mountain. “[It’s] not confusing what needs to be done, it’s just really hard.” 

That climb, so to speak, will require the right investments in cell line development, media, and bioreactors. It will require “a thoughtful approach” to working with regulators and an effective marketing strategy. It will involve enormous amounts of risk and millions if not billions of dollars.

Ultimately, Tetrick believes companies that can get us through this enormously difficult process will enable the majority of the population to live in a world where eating meat doesn’t necessarily mean slaughtering animals or destroying the planet. For many, getting there will be a mountain worth climbing.

SKS 2020: Impossible Foods CEO on Cell-Based Meat: “It’s Never Going to Be a Thing”

Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown didn’t mince words when asked about the future of cell-based meat today at the Smart Kitchen Summit. “That will never be a commercial endeavor,” Brown said. “The reason has to do with the fact that it’s irreversibly expensive.”

While Brown agreed with the sentiment behind cell-based meat — removing animals from our diets — he doesn’t think the concept is a viable solution. Brown said that if companies were able to recreate muscle cells, that technology would be used first for therapeutic purposes, which would be much more lucrative than selling a facsimile of animal products.

Brown went on to create a hypothetical example. If 200 years ago, he theorized, you tried to develop new transportation by recreating the muscle cells of a horse, “you miss the real opportunities” because you’d be “stuck with limitations of animal cells.”

Brown’s fiery assertion is bound to ruffle some feathers in the cell-based meat world, which is full of companies hard at work re-creating meats in the lab. Startups in the cultured meat sector have raised a lot of money just over this past year: Memphis Meat raised $161 million in January, Integriculture raised $7.4 million in May, New Age Meats raised $4.7 million for its cell-based pork in July, and Mosa Meat raised $55 million for its cell-based burgers just last month.

In addition to raising money, cell-based meat companies are busy developing a variety of products including briskets, shrimp, yellowtail, bacon and even kangaroo.

Though Brown definitely has a plant-based horse in this race, his point is something we at The Spoon have pondered before. If plant-based meat tastes this good, do we even need to make meat in a lab? The plant-based ground beefs and pork from both Impossible and Beyond Meat are delicious. Should more resources be funneled into the cultured meat space, which, according to the companies making cell-based meat, is still years away from commercial availability at scale?

As if to erase any doubt about his position on cell-based meat, Brown said “It’s never going to be a thing. I’d put any amount of money on that.”

Australian Company Vow Is Taste Testing Cell-based Kangaroo and Other Cultured Meats

Cell-based meat may be some time away from the grocery aisle, but that hasn’t stopped companies all over the world from trying to raise animal protein without the actual animal. Think cell-based beef, pork, and seafood, and, now, kangaroo and alpaca. 

The latter two on that list come courtesy of a Sydney, Austraila-based company called Vow, which today announced a recent “culinary demonstration” of its “multi-species meat platform.” Working with Australian chefs Neil Perry Corey Costelloe, Vow in August held a recent event showing off six of its cell-based meat types: goat, pork kangaroo, rabbit, lamb, and alpaca. All dishes came from Vow’s cell library (more on that below).

On its website, Vow says it takes just six weeks to get from animal cell to plated product. The company first takes and nourishes the animal cells, which grow in cultivators and form fat, tissue, and muscle just as they would if growing inside the animal.  

There are a couple things that set Vow apart from other companies working in the cell-based meat space. First is the sheer selection of meat Vow aims to eventually offer the buying public. Kangaroo and alpaca are unconventional enough when it comes to cultured meat, but Vow has also name-dropped zebra, yak, and other animals in the past. 

This isn’t just a gimmick to grow weird meat for the “wow” factor. Speaking recently to Food Navigator, Vow’s co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer Tim Noakesmith pointed to the “uncanny valley” problem meat alternatives can encounter: that giving people a product they are used to but with a slight variation (e.g., texture, aftertaste) will garner a negative reaction.

“If we offer them something new, a new meat via a new format and give them a completely different experience, there won’t be this prior comparison [or the instinct to reject the new experience],” he told Food Navigator.

True to that idea, Vow keeps a “cell library” of different cells its scoured from all corners of the earth, which is the other factor setting it apart from others in the cultured meat space. The company says there are “hundreds upon hundreds of possible combinations” for future meat.

Vow co-founder and CEO George Peppou said in today’s press release that the recent taste testing event represented a milestone that “demonstrates we can grow the cells of any animal, not just those we can farm.”

Thus far, Integriculture’s cell-based foie gras and BlueNalu’s crustaceans are about as exotic as it’s gotten for cultured meat. So Vow’s recent unveiling of its new dishes is definitely a milestone for the cell-baed meat sector, which has raised around $290 million so far in 2020.

Vow says it is currently hiring chefs, food scientists, and sensory experts to help develop new products. For now, the company is focused on markets in the Asia-Pacific region. 

IntegriCulture Awarded $2.2 Million Grant to Build New Commercial Cell Ag Facility

Yesterday, Integriculture was awarded a $2.2 million dollar grant by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), a part of the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry that supports high-risk technologies that aim to resolve social issues. 

NEDO awarded a total ¥5.77 billion ( $54.7 million USD)  to eight Japanese start-ups. With each grant comes a spot in NEDO’s Product Commercialization Alliance (PCA) program, an accelerator for start-ups expected to achieve continuous sales within three years.

IntegriCulture’s will use the money for a commercial production site for cellular agriculture projects. Earlier this year the company outlined the specifics of its CultNet System, a general-purpose, large-scale cell culture technology. The system is intended to mimic the cell-to-cell communication that happens in vivo. The grow cells (muscle, fat, connective tissue) and cells that produce growth factors in adjacent bioreactors. In theory, the technology makes it possible to culture any type of animal cell in large quantities.

The coming production site will make it possible to scale, automate and integrate quality controls into the CultNet System, according to a press release from IntegriCulture. Ultimately, the site will be the launching pad commercial scale cellular ag projects possible, starting with IntegriCulture’s own cultured foie gras expected to be in restaurants by 2021.

The PCA grant comes just after Integriculture raised a ¥800 million (~$7.4 million USD) Series A round earlier this Spring to further development of its cell-based meat and also for building the company’s first commercial-scale bioreactor.

But the goal of the CultNet System was never to exclusively produce IntegriCulture products. CEO Yuki Hanyu’s plan is to create an infrastructure that IntegriCulture clients from every sector—food, supplements, cosmetics, materials—could use to to develop and execute cell-based projects. 

Democratization of cellular agriculture has always been at the heart of Hanyu’s work. IntegriCulture was born out of the DIY cultured meat community he founded in 2015 called the Shojinmeat Project. Shojinmeat offers a step-by-guide for hobbyists who want to culture meat at home. And since IntegriCulture’s commercial scale foie gras is still a few years off, the fastest way to access to cultured meat might be growing it yourself.  

Bond Pet Foods Creates Cultured Chicken Protein Prototype for Pet Nutrition

Don’t worry, animal lovers: No chickens (and by chickens we mean Inga the hen) were hurt in the creation of this dog food.

That’s according to Bond Pet Foods, who announced this week that the company has created what it claims to be the “world’s first cultured chicken meat protein for pet food applications.”

According to the announcement, the company took a “one-time blood sample – in this case, from a heritage hen named Inga who is alive and well at a farm in Lindsborg, Kansas – to determine the genetic code for the best types of chicken proteins to nourish dogs and cats.”

From there, the company’s scientists coupled the genetic code with food grade yeast in a fermentation tank. The end result was animal protein, which Bond’s culinary team used as a novel ingredient in a baked pet treat. The company then tested it with a handful of dogs at their headquarters in Boulder, Colorado.

Bond said that once fully developed, its fermented chicken protein will have the same primary nutrients as conventionally produced chicken meat.

Looking forward, the company hopes to scale up its prototype and plans to work towards bringing products to market based on this new cultured protein by 2023. To help fund this growth, the company also announced they’d closed a bridge round of financing with follow-on from the company’s original seed investors.

While it’s easy for most of us to think of conventionally farmed animal alternatives for human consumption since we see the end product on our plates, the pet food industry is also a massive consumer of factory farmed animal meat. According to a report from iFeeder and the Pet Food Institute, nearly 3.8 million tons of animal-derived ingredients were used in dog and cat food in the US in 2018. Because of this, a new generation of science-forward pet food startups have cropped up in recent years to create new sources of protein for our pets.

In addition to Bond, Wild Earth has developed a line up of pet food with plant-derived protein in the form of a fungi called Koji, while Because Animals, a startup creating both plant-based and cultured protein-based pet food, has already created a cultured-mouse meat prototype for cats.

All of this innovation in pet food protein hopefully means a future where not only our Fido and Felix are happy, but is also good news for the Ingas of the world.

The Food Tech Show: Ghost Kitchens, $1 Keto Cookies & the Magical Egg Cooker

The Spoon editors got together to talk about some of the most interesting food tech news of the past week (as well as complain about high-priced cookies).

Some of the stories we talk about on the pod include:

As always, you can listen to The Food Tech Show in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download the show direct to your device or just click play below.

Mosa Meat Achieves 80x Reduction in Medium Cost For Creating Lab-Grown Meat

It seems the team that created the world’s first lab-grown hamburger has achieved another milestone that could help usher in a post-industrial meat era.

Mosa Meat announced today they have achieved an 80x reduction in the cost of the growth medium for their lab-grown meat. According to the announcement, the achievement was driven by the company’s “Media Optimisation” team.

Mosa Meat is famously founded by Mark Post and Peter Verstrate, the same Dutch research team that created the world’s first cultured meat in 2013. A nascent cultured meat industry has sprung up since those early days and now, as the world’s industrial meat supply comes under increasing strain, the same team that brought us the $325,000 hamburger is working towards achieving a scale of production that could one day match that of the industrial meat processing world.

To achieve that scale, one of the key gating factors will be a reduction in the cost of the growth medium, the nutrient “soup” that feeds the animal cells so they can replicate. Part of that transition is to move away from FBS (Fetal Bovine Serum), something Mosa announced they had achieved last year. FBS is the standard growth medium used by the cultured meat industry, but it is both expensive and seen as inhumane since it is gathered from the blood of pregnant dairy cows at slaughter.

With the reduction in cost of growth medium and the launch of a new pilot production plant, Mosa Meat is attempting to build a foundation to produce cultured meat at a price closer to that of Big Mac than that famous first burger created in a lab almost 10 years ago. This vision of a scalable cultured meat future is a large reason why the company was able to raise an additional €5 million earlier this month from Bell Food Group, further upping the investment by one of the largest meat processors in Europe.

IntegriCulture Raises $7.4M for Cell-based Meat Development

Cellular agriculture startup Integriculture has raised a ¥800 million (~$7.4 million USD) Series A round to further the development of its cell-based meat, according to AgFunder News. The round was led by AgFunder, Beyond Next Ventures, Hiroshima Ventures, Hiroshima Venture Capital, NH Foods, Real Tech Fund, and VU Venture Partners. It also included participation from several other investors, including Caygan Capital CEO Naruhisa Nakagawa. This brings IntegriCulture’s total funding to date to ¥1.1 billion, or about $10.2 million USD.

The company will use the new funds for further research and development around its cell-based meat and also for building a production facility and the company’s first commercial-scale bioreactor. 

Integriculture’s first edible product will be its cell-based foie gras, which is grown in a bioreactor rather than in, well, an animal, thereby eliminating the ethical issues surrounding foie gras. Last year, company CEO Yuki Hanyu told my colleague Catherine Lamb that it plans to launch the cultured liver in restaurants by 2021 and in retail by 2023.

Hanyu is also the founder of DIY cultured meat community Shojinmeat which he started with the idea of “democratizing meat.” The aim was to give every household the ability to grow their own cultured meat in their own homes. IntegriCulture spun out from Shojinmeat in 2015. IntegriCulture’s new CulNet system, which it unveiled earlier this month, is geared towards that, allowing businesses and even (very ambitious) individuals to culture their own animal tissue.

While that sounds a little more involved than, say, growing a garden or even making your own yeast at home, it’s possible the pandemic will accelerate this idea of democratizing meat. 

In the future, IntegriCulture hopes its CulNet system will be able to culture any type of animal cell, so that they can branch out into other types of alt-meat production and even move into non-food industries like medical and skincare. 

Over Sourdough? Your Next Quarantine Activity Could be Growing Meat

At this point we’re all over making sourdough, right? The needy sourdough starters, the shortages of flour… even for the fermentation-curious, it’s getting to be more trouble than it’s worth.

So for your next foodtech quarantine project, may I suggest growing your own meat?

If you don’t know where to start, Japanese company Integriculture has your back. Earlier this month the startup laid out the details of its new CulNet System; a technology that allows individuals and businesses to culture their own animal tissue.

Democratizing cultured meat has always been a goal for Integriculture founder Yuki Hanyu. In fact, Integriculture spun out of Shojinmeat, a DIY maker community focused on cultured meat founded in 2015. Interested hobbyists can already follow Shojinmeat’s guide — which is formatted to look like manga — to grow their own meat, right now.

The new CulNet system builds on Shojinmeat’s DIY framework to introduce a more sophisticated technology. It will allow everyone from restaurants to farmers to, yes, home hobbyists to grow their own animal tissue in larger quantities, with more precision.

Photo: Integriculture

Unlike Shojinmeat though, the CulNet System is not quite available yet. Integriculture is still in the R&D phase. It plans to begin licensing out the CulNet System — which includes hardware, animal starter cells, and media to feed cell growth — within the next two years or so. Until then, curious makers can still follow Shojinmeat’s guide to grow their own meat in a small scale.

Hanyu also mentioned at last year’s SKS Japan that the company was planning to release a product called Space Salt, essentially a dried version of cell culture media containing a blend of salt and amino acids, to help home enthusiasts grow their cells more easily. Hanyu said that they weren’t able to launch SpaceSalt last year because of difficulty sourcing ingredients from a factory that would give them a “legally food grade” mark. They’re still working to commercialize it.

The CulNet System is obviously geared to serious at-home makers who have the patience and motivation to tackle something like growing their own meat. But with meat processing plants closing and a meat shortage on the horizon, more and more people are taking a long, hard look at where our meat comes from.

This awareness could help accelerate consumer acceptance of new technologies like cultured meat — whether it’s made at home or by startups like Integriculture, Memphis Meats and Aleph Farms. For its part, Integriculture hosted a private taste test of their first product, cell-based foie gras, in 2019, and plans to start selling it commercially in 2021.

If growing your own animal tissue at home seems like too much work, you could always use this time to learn a new restaurant-worthy recipe, make good use of your smart kitchen gadgets, or even go all-out and develop a new connected appliance. Or just go back to yeast and make something besides sourdough.

Study: Consumers Willing to Pay 37 Percent More for Cultured Meat

A new study from Maastricht University (UM), where Dr. Mark Post created the world’s first cultured hamburger in 2013, suggests that consumers are willing to pay a premium for cell-based meat.

The study, published in PLOSONE this week, was based on a tasting that UM scientists held for 193 consumers in the Netherlands. It’s the first study on consumer reactions to cell-based meat that included a physical product to taste. The participants were first given a presentation on cultured meat, including the science behind its production and its environmental benefits. They were then given two samples of hamburger, one labeled ‘conventional’ and the other ‘cultured.” However, in reality both were traditional beef burgers.

Even though the samples were identical, all participants rated the flavor of the so-called ‘cultured’ hamburger higher than the ‘conventional’ one. Afterwards 58 percent of the tasters said they would be willing to pay extra — an average premium of 37 percent — for cultured meat.

The participants also noted that their main deciding factor to determine how much more they’d pay for cultured meat was information. The more they knew about the process behind cell-based meat production — and its global societal and environmental impact — the more they were willing to pay for it.

The study also delves a bit into the idea of disgust, which is often more dependent on cultural norms than actual taste (ex. Westerners won’t eat bugs, even though they’re super sustainable). Disgust is certainly one of the bigger challenges that cultured meat will face when it gets to market. Companies have to convince consumers to not only sample this newfangled product — meat grown from cells in bioreactors — but, at least initially, they’ll also have to pay more for it.

“The study shows… that consumers will eat cultured meat if they are served it,” Post noted in an email sent to The Spoon. Not only that, they might even be willing to fork over more money for it. That is, as long as they’re provided with enough information to understand what exactly cell-based meat is, and why it could be an appealing option.

Of course, when cultured meat does eventually hit the market — likely a few years from now in restaurants, a decade from now in supermarkets — companies won’t be able to sit down every consumer and give them a presentation on why it’s a good option for the planet. Instead, they’ll have to rely on marketing to get the word out. Maybe even rope in some high-profile celebrity and chef endorsers like Beyond Meat has done.

They’ll also likely have to face negative campaigns from Big Meat and its friends. The CCF, a lobbying agency with ties to meat corporations, has already aired harsh commercials tearing down plant-based meat. When cultured meat — which is actual animal tissue, just grown outside the animal — becomes available, you can bet that Big Meat will come out swinging. At that point, information (and misinformation) will become all the more important.