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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

cultured meat

Shiok Meats is First Cultured Meat Company Accepted into Y Combinator

Famed startup accelerator Y Combinator just announced the 23 companies joining its newest YC Winer 2019 batch. Among them is Shiok Meats, a Singapore-based startup developing cell-based crab and shrimp, and the first cell-based meat company to join Y Combinator.

Though they’ll be in the Bay Area to participate in Y Combinator, co-founder Dr. Sandhya Sriram told The Spoon earlier this year that they’re planning to roll out their products in Southeast Asia, specifically Singapore, Hong Kong, and India. They expect to have their first cell-based product to market in three to five years.

Y Combinator has previously invested in plant-based meat companies like Seattle Food Tech. Last summer the accelerator even included the Good Food Institute, a non-profit promoting the growth of meat alternatives, both plant-based and cell-based.

However, by letting a cultured meat company through its hallowed doors, Y Combinator is now blessing cell-based meat as a viable investment opportunity. And a blessing from the accelerator that backed AirBnB and Dropbox, among other cash cow companies, is likely going to make clean meat even more of an investment magnet than it already is.

It’s interesting that Y Combinator chose Shiok Meats as the first cell-based meat company to join their ranks, since I’m betting they’re not the first to apply. Applications can be a crapshoot and all that, but perhaps the accelerator was convinced to accept the Singaporean startup because they were convinced, as I was, that Shiok Meat’s plan to launch in Southeast Asia means that it could have a greater global impact than cultured meat companies in the U.S. or Europe.

In any case, hopefully Y Combinator’s investment and mentorship will help Shiok Meats get cell-based shrimp dumplings on our plates even sooner. In fact, the startup already has a product ready for taste testing. Shiok Meats will be hosting a tasting of dumplings made with its cell-based shrimp later this month at the Disruption in Food and Sustainability Summit in their home country of Singapore.

FDA Chief Scott “An Almond Doesn’t Lactate” Gottlieb Resigns

Scott Gottlieb, the Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and better known around The Spoon as the guy who brought the debate over what to label “meat” and “milk” to national attention, announced his resignation from THE FDA today. It will go into effect next month.

In the age of Trump, it’s easy to assume an ulterior motive for any sudden prominent agency head departure. But according to The Washington Post, Gottlieb wanted to spend more time with his family in Connecticut, and the White House did not ask for his resignation.

Whatever the reason, we’ve spilled our fair share of ink covering Mr. Gottlieb’s tenure at the FDA, as he thrust the agency into the debate over which government body should oversee the regulation of emerging lab-grown or “cultured” meat products and what they should be called. He even held a public meeting on the topic to take comment as it developed those new regulations. Meat lobbying groups were insistent that only products derived from animals that were born, raised and slaughtered could be labeled as meat.

Given that cultured meat is still a ways off, Gottleib’s prominent work in the space was more of an attempt to get ahead of an issue before it literally hit the market, and to a certain extent, he succeeded. The FDA and USDA later agreed to a framework that divvied up regulatory responsibilities for the forthcoming cultured meat, and he did bring the labeling debate to national attention.

But Gottlieb probably got a little more attention than he wanted when he extended the labeling debate over to “milk.” At a Politico Summit last summer, Gottlieb said the FDA would start more strictly enforcing existing rules around what could be marketed as milk, a move that could spell trouble for the booming plant-based milk industry. FDA guidelines say that milk comes from a lactating animal, which made Gottlieb quip “An almond doesn’t lactate.” This joke caught the ear of Stephen Colbert, who mocked Gottlieb, saying ““If it ain’t from a mammal, you can’t call it milk; it has to be ‘soy juice’ and ‘almond sweat.”

When It Comes to Labeling Food “Meat,” Where Do We Draw The Line?

Things used to be so simple. Meat used to cover products that came from slaughtered animals, and everything else was, uh, not meat. But now the lines are blurred — and the meat industry is pissed about it.

This weekend the New York Times ran a story about pushback from animal agriculture industry groups against use the use of the term “meat” to describe any sausage, chop, or burger made from plants or grown in a petri dish — in short, anything that didn’t come from a slaughtered animal. Just this week, Arizona and Arkansas joined the over a dozen states that have introduced meat labeling bills.

The first law of this sort was passed last May in Missouri. The law prohibited companies from “misrepresenting a product as meat that is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry.” A few months after it passed, a coalition led by Tofurky, the American Civil Liberties Union and others challenged the new law.

The debate isn’t just limited to the butcher counter. In July of last year FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced that his agency would start tightening regulations over what could and couldn’t be called “milk.”

On the surface, this pushback may seem a little bit petty. After all, the U.S. meat industry was worth $4.2 trillion in 2016 and show no signs of slowing down, while plant-based meat netted a comparatively tiny $670 million in 2018. Why does Big Meat care what vegan burgers call themselves?

In short, they care because they’re threatened. From 2017 to 2018, demand for plant-based meat rose a whopping 24 percent. To meet that demand we’ve seen an explosion of plant-based meat options, many of which do a pretty dang good job imitating meat thanks to new technologies like genetically modified heme or new protein extrusion methods. On top of that, companies like Beyond Meat are pushing to have their products displayed in the meat aisle of grocery stores.

Plant-based meat is no longer a fringe product for hippies — it’s now a legitimate competitor for traditional meat. And animal agriculture groups know it.

Once cell-based meat comes to market, the issue of what defines “meat” will become even more pressing. No matter how bloody or juicy the taste, plant-based burgers are still fundamentally not made of animals. Cell-based (or cultured) meat, however, is actual animal tissue — that just happens to have been made in a bath of serum, not a slaughterhouse. And some cultured meat companies have made the point that cell-based fish and pork must be labeled as “fish” and “pork” for both allergy and transparency reasons.


Finless Foods is creating cultured bluefin tuna [Taylor Grote vis Upsplash]

It’s hard to make the argument that meat made from actual animal muscle and fat cells should be called anything other than “meat.” (The USDA will have the final say on how to label cell-based meat.) However, adding qualifiers seems to make a lot of sense, both for plant-based and cultured meat. Not only to appease the cattlemen, but also for consumers.

Nebraska Democratic state senator Carol Blood, a vegan, was inspired to write a meat-labeling bill after she witnessed two women who were unclear over whether or not Beyond Meat contained animal tissue. “I don’t care that it says burger — I care that it says it’s meat,” Ms. Blood said in the New York Times.

The fact that meat alternatives are, well, alternative to meat is one of their main selling points. It would follow, then, that these companies would want to call out the fact that their products are not made from slaughtered animals. At the same time, plant-based meat companies are trying to draw in flexitarian consumers by making products that taste just as good as meat, without the animal.

Do you see how easy it is to spin yourself up into a tangled mess of meat labeling confusion?

There isn’t a clear-cut answer here, but I for one am team let-alternatives-call-themselves-meat-if-they-want — as long as they add a qualifier like “plant-based” or “cultured” so that the consumer is clear on what they’re buying.

Instead of putting their energy into pushing for labeling crackdowns, meat industry players would do well to take a page from Tyson’s and Cargill’s books and invest in their competition. (In fact, Tyson is reportedly developing its own line of plant-based “meats.”) It won’t solve the meat labeling question, but by having a stake in the meat alternatives game could help ease tensions in a future that’s only going to get more and more complicated.

JUST Partners with Toriyama to Create Cheaper Cultured Wagyu Beef … Eventually

This morning, plant-based food company JUST, Inc. announced that it will work with Japanese producer Toriyama to develop the first cultured Wagyu beef.

The San Francisco-based company will use tissue samples taken from Toriyama’s Wagyu cows (or cuts of their beef) and use that to create cell lines to grow the meat cells. Awano Food Group, a meat and seafood supplier, will market and distribute the cell-based meat, and Toriyama will get a percentage of the profit from each pound of meat that JUST sells.

But hold the applause — there are still quite a few problems JUST has to tackle before we can taste Wagyu grown outside the cow.

In a video with the Wall Street Journal, JUST CEO Josh Tetrick said that they would debut a cultured Wagyu hamburger within “a year, a year and a half.” But the press announcement notes that “as with any other product, the first step is an extensive research and development period followed by scale-up, testing, regulatory approvals and availability to the public.” All of which are pretty significant hurdles, which have to be overcome before the cell-based Wagyu can get on our plate.

Let’s start with the first issue: R&D. At this point, achieving the buttery texture of Wagyu steak is out of the question. Though some scientists are working on 3D printing meat to create different textures, or even using plants as scaffolds on which to grow the animal tissue, we’re not going to see a thick, marbled cut of cultured Wagyu anytime soon. Even Aleph Farms, the company in Israeli developing the first cell-based steak, is years away from bringing its product to market.

However, it seems like JUST is planning to avoid the steak issue altogether by making a Wagyu hamburger. From a get-to-market stance, that makes a lot of sense; but I have to wonder if it will taste all that different from any other cell-based ground beef. After all, most scientists “grow’ the meat tissue and fat cells separately and then combine them, so they can make their ground beef as fatty as they’d like. That essentially negates Wagyu’s biggest unique value add: its rich fat marbling.

Then there’s regulation. The USDA and FDA already took the first few steps towards establishing a regulatory process last month, but if JUST is planning to release their burger within a year or so, the issues around naming and food safety might not be ironed out. JUST is planning to bring a poultry cell-based product to market by the end of this year, however (though they have yet to do so). If they succeed, there will theoretically be at least some regulatory precedent in place before the Wagyu comes onto the scene.

The regulatory piece of the puzzle brings up another question: Will JUST be able to sell its new product with the label of “Wagyu”? The term is a specific Japanese beef cattle breed which dates back thousands of years and carries a lot of weight with discerning carnivores. Clearly Toriyama doesn’t have a problem with JUST using the name, but I wonder if other Wagyu producers will have the same laissez-faire attitude.

There’s also the issue of terroir, or the natural elements that give local foods, like Parmesan or Champagne, their inimitable flavor. For example, Crowd Cow has an olive Wagyu that has a legendary taste because the animals are fed caramelized olives (side note: yum). It seems like this level of nuance and locality would be reaaaaally tricky to translate into meat cultivated in a sanitized room.

However, JUST’s partnership with Toriyama does illustrate one of the coolest potentials of cell-based meats: accessibility. With its intense fat marbling, Wagyu is widely considered the Holy Grail for carnivores. It’s also really expensive; to give you an idea, Costco once sold it for $109.09 per pound. In their press release, JUST states that it hopes to use its technology to decrease the cost of Wagyu, so it can share the meat with more people at more amenable “price-points.” Which might indeed be possible… if and when they succeed in producing a product with the distinct Wagyu-ness of Wagyu.

JUST is known for pushing the envelope on cell-based meat technology. If it does succeed in creating a Wagyu product, its success (or failure) will pave the way for other companies working to recreate specific heritage meat types with cell culture technology.

This piece was updated with new information about the Wagyu product timeline from a WSJ video. 

Allergy Fears and Transparency Among Issues at latest USDA/FDA Meat-ing

Earlier this week, scientists, entrepreneurs, and concerned members of the public got together to discuss the future of cell-based (also called “cultured” and “lab-grown”) meat during a joint meeting put on by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). According to the FDA news release, the meeting was intended to “focus on the potential hazards, oversight considerations, and labeling of cell cultured food products derived from livestock and poultry.”

The FDA held the first meeting on cultured meat back in July, and while it succeeded in starting the conversation around regulation of meat grown outside an animal, not much was concluded. From the people I spoke to who attended the meeting, everyone agreed that something had to be done to regulate this new edible technology, but no one could agree exactly what — or even what to call it.

Watching recordings from the meeting and scanning through Twitter, one topic seemed to be the most divisive, contentious, and downright critical: labeling. It’s where I think that the real stakes (steaks?) are: nomenclature will be a determining factor in consumer perception of this new technology. Here are a few interesting points that came up during the meeting:

Labeling is actually a health concern

“We cell-based food producers do need to use the terms ‘fish’ and ‘meat’,” said Michael Selden, the CEO of cultured seafood company Finless Foods. “If one is allergic to animal-based seafood, that person has a high probability that they’ll be allergic to the seafood made with our technology.”

His company is working to create fish meat that is identical, on a cellular level, to traditional fish. If they succeed, labeling cultured salmon something like “cell-based artificial salmon product,” consumers with a life-threatening allergy to salmon might not realize that it posed just as big a threat.

Given, not all that many consumers are allergic to meat and seafood. But it’s still an important point: cultured meat is meat on a molecular level.

Photo: Flickr, by Adactio

Should labeling address how the product is made?

“It’s clear that consumers care about the way that their food is produced,” said Liz Holt of the Animal Legal Defense Fund. If cultured meat is required to disclose all the substances that went into it, should traditional meat be held to the same standards?

As of now, meat companies can choose whether or not to display information about the animal’s life and diet, such as “grass-fed” or “free-range.” They don’t have to disclose what the animal ate, or where it was raised.

Some consumers might not want to know exactly what type of life the cow in their bargain ground beef had before making its way onto their plate. Specht’s point shows that more information is generally good — but sometimes the consumer doesn’t want or need it.

Cell-based meat wants its own labels

Both sides of the table agreed on one thing: cultured meat should be labeled differently than traditional meat. Cultured meat startups want to indicate to the consumer that their product is meat, but is also different than meat from a slaughtered animal.

Peter Licari, CTO of JUST, said that there should be a regulatory nomenclature that “sufficiently differentiates cell-cultured products from traditional meat products but appropriately acknowledges these products as meat.”

What exactly that elusive final term will be — one that effectively communicates both that the product is meat, but not meat from a slaughtered animal — isn’t clear. But companies and regulatory bodies need to figure it out pretty quickly. JUST is still planning to be the first company to bring cultured meat to market by the end of this year, and Finless Foods will launch its cell-based tuna in 2019. By 2021 Mosa Meats and Memphis Meats will join them.

Isha Datar of New Harvest said it best, speaking at the meeting: “This is not just a product, but a new paradigm for food production.” Now the FDA and USDA need to figure out what to call it.

Meatable Claims to Hold the Key to Scalable Cultured Meat In a Single Cell

Meatable, a new startup creating cell-based meat, claims it will be able to change the world with a single cell. It’s a tagline, sure, but it might also be true. The Netherlands-based company works with pluripotent cells to create cultured meat quickly and without a need for fetal bovine serum (FBS).

They’re not the only ones who believe in their potential. Last month the startup, which was founded in early 2018, raised a $3.5 million seed round led by BlueYard Capital, with participation from Atlantic Food Labs, Backed VC, and angel investors.

Pluripotent stem cells are superior to other stem cells (which cultured meat companies have been using up until now) for two reasons: versatility and speed.

A muscle stem cell can only ever proliferate to create muscle, and a fat stem cell can only be fat. Pluripotent cells, however, can transform into whatever type of cell the scientist chooses. “They’re very malleable, with a high proliferation capacity,” Meatable CTO Daan Luining explained to me over the phone. “Like a blank slate.” Before Meatable, Luining cut his teeth with Dr. Mark Post, creator the first cultured burger, and spent time at New Harvest, an NGO which finances research into cell-based meat.

Pluripotent cells also divide 2 to 2.5 times faster than non-pluripotent cells, proliferating to create a burger-sized amount of meat in just three weeks. “You have to wait three years to raise a cow,” said Luining.

Significantly, Pluripotent cells require minimal animal intervention. Instead of gathering a tissue sample from a living animal, which is what most cultured meat companies are doing, Meatable scientists collect blood from the clipped umbilical cord of a just-birthed calf then filter it to harvest the special cells.

Perhaps most importantly, they don’t rely on fetal bovine serum (FBS), the controversial media many startups making cell-based meat take from the necks of baby cows in slaughterhouses and use to grow their product. But FBS is expensive and, well, requires animals to be killed. “FBS defeats the purpose of cell-based meat,” said Meatable CEO Krijn De Nood.

The independence from FBS alone would be enough of a reason to get jazzed about pluripotent cells. Add in their speed and agility, however, and they’re Meatable’s ticket to culture meat a lot quicker than their competitors in a completely non-invasive, animal-free way. And make it cheaper, to boot.

Meatable CTO Daan Luining, left; CEO Krijn De Nood, middle; Ruud Out, who runs Meatable lab in Leiden, right.

So why don’t all cultured meat companies take advantage of these miracle cells, you might ask? Up until now, pluripotent cells were difficult to control. However, recently Dr. Mark Kotter, a scientist at the University of Cambridge, collaborated with Dr. Roger Pedersenat of Stanford University to develop a technology which can better manage the cells and dictate their growth. Luining told me that Meatable has an exclusive license to use this tech in cell-based meat production, which should theoretically give them a leg up on the competition.

But first, they’ll have to debut the cells in a taste test. Meatable is currently focusing on beef, but they hope to rapidly expand into pork, poultry, and even liver, for ethical foie gras. They expect to present their first burger to the public in three years, by which time they’ll already have a production process in place so they can quickly scale. Commercial sales are probably five years down the road.

This timeline puts them behind other cell-based meat companies. Memphis Meat and Mosa Meat have stated that they will bring cultured meat fully to market by 2021, and Just Inc. claims it will make the first sale of cell-based meat by the end of this year. But Meatable isn’t necessarily in a rush. “We’re not necessarily going for first; we’re going for best,” Luining told me.

Their timing might actually be an advantage. When cell-based meat products first come to market, it will no doubt take time for consumers to warm up to the idea of chowing down on a hamburger grown in a lab. By the time there’s a hungry demand for cultured meat, Meatable will be there — with cheap, scalable beef — to meet it.

“Eventually, people will choose a product that tastes the best and is the cheapest,” said Luining. “We will have the edge there.”

Clean Meat Is Out — Cell-Based Meat is In

One of the biggest news stories from last week’s Good Food Conference (GFC) happened after all the speakers had left the stage. Over email, Brian Spears, the CEO and co-founder of cellular agriculture company New Age Meats, told me that:

1-2 reps of all the existing “clean meat” companies, except for just a few, met on Friday after the Good Food Conference. We decided that, for the purposes of working with traditional meat companies and US regulators, we are abandoning the term clean meat in favor of cell-based meat. We also decided to form an industry trade association.

Now, this is not the first time that clean meat (also known as in-vitro, lab-grown, and cultured meat) has rebranded. But unlike previous name switches, which were mostly working to quiet public fears and make meat grown in a lab environment sound palatable, this new term is targeting traditional meat companies and U.S. regulators.

In recent months, the question of what to call cultured meat has stirred up some serious controversy with both parties. A coalition of big meat production groups penned a letter to President Trump, asking for equal regulation for cell-based and traditional meat. A few months ago the FDA had a public meeting to open dialogue about regulation, terminology, and safety of cultured meat technology, and most recently a Missouri law went into effect which only allows food “derived from harvested production livestock or poultry” to be called “meat.”

By rebranding as “cell-based meat,” these companies are hoping to walk a fine line that will appease both consumers and the governing bodies who will eventually regulate food produced through cellular agriculture. “Cell-based meat” is certainly more revealing than “clean meat,” which, while it sounds nice, doesn’t exactly reveal why it’s clean.

That term is also pretty passive aggressive towards traditional meat companies. “Clean” implies that the alternative — that is, meat from slaughtered animals — is dirty. And if you compare the pristine lab environment in which cultured meat is made to a slaughterhouse, it certainly is cleaner. But that terminology is already ruffling lots of feathers in Big Meat, who are responding by writing letters and pushing laws to block “clean meat” from calling itself meat at all.

Honestly, I’m torn on whether the name change is a good idea — or even necessary. If cultured meat is as safe as its producers say (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be), it will eventually get regulatory approval and make its way to market — no matter what it’s called. To me, the bigger issue around naming is consumer acceptance. My guess is that people would gravitate to something called “clean” meat more readily than the comparatively clinical “cell-based” meat. But all that will lie with the marketing team, and right now most cultured meat companies are made up chiefly of scientists.

During the GFC, I was also struck by a point made by Barb Stuckey, President and Chief Innovation Officer at Mattson. She said: “I don’t know if what we call clean meat matters as much as what these companies do with their marketing. My family doesn’t think of Impossible burgers as “veggie burgers,” they’re just Impossible Burgers.” Maybe terminology won’t matter at all, and instead of asking for a “clean” or “cell-based” burger in 10 years, people will request a “Memphis” or a “Mosa.”

Though the number of cell-based meat companies is growing, there are still relatively few — only 27, was the number given at the GFC. A group that small can be agile, as long as they’re all on the same page. It wouldn’t surprise me if we see another rebrand, either for regulatory or consumer acceptance purposes, over the next few years.

If you’re curious about how plant- and cell-based meat will disrupt the consumer meal journey, join us at the Smart Kitchen Summit on October 8-9th for our Future of Meat panel featuring innovators from Seattle Food Tech, JUST, and more. Get your tickets before they sell out!

Tofurky and the ACLU go to the Meat-resses in Legal Dispute with Missouri

There are serious issues that sound silly when you say them out loud. For instance, this sentence: Tofurky and the American Civil Liberties Union are among a coalition challenging a new Missouri law that regulates what food products can be called “meat.”

No disrespect to the company, but it’s hard not to giggle when you hear about Tofurky lawyering up.

But the silliness of Tofukey’s portmanteau quickly subsides when you realize what’s at stake — or in this case, steak.

The debate over what can and can’t be called meat has been going on for a good part of this year. Traditional meat organizations have seen the investment and advancements in lab-grown meat (or cultured meat) and as so many threatened incumbents do, they have turned to government regulation. While the FDA held a public meeting about the naming issue, Missouri went ahead and became the first state to pass a law outlining what could be called meat.

Back in May, the Missouri Senate passed legislation that included Senate Bill No. 977, which prohibits “misrepresenting a product as meat that is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry.” That law goes into effect today, and violators could be fined up to $1,000 and be imprisoned for a year.

The Missouri Cattlemen’s Association (MCA), which supported the bill, has the following statement on its website: “Major companies are investing in developing laboratory grown meat and calling it ‘beef.’ MCA will push for a protection of its nomenclature by protecting the word beef to only include food derived from actual livestock production. This is all about marketing with integrity. MCA will not stand for laboratory grown food or plant based meat alternatives to be marketed as something it’s not.”

Part of the argument from the MCA and similar agricultural organizations around the country is that alterna-meats will cause confusion among consumers. Sure, shoppers may not accidentally grab a Tofurky at Thanksgiving, but as lab meat makes its way to market, there are legitimate labeling issues at play. What should the labeling requirement be for meat grown in a lab? Beyond Meat likes to sell its burger patties in the meat aisle — does having “meat” in its name cause confusion?

While its moniker may not befuddle people, Tofurky has nonetheless joined up with the ACLU, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and the Good Food Institute to take on this legislation. Among the complaints this coalition has is that the law plays favorites to benefit the meat industry, violates free speech, and violates a law preventing discrimination against out-of-state companies. Additionally, they argue that the law itself is so vague that it’s hard to follow.

Again, on the surface, it seems silly to make such a big ado about meat. But millions of dollars are being invested in lab-grown meat startups that are poised to drastically change what and how we eat meat — er, cultured animal tissue. And as the FDA has pointed out, it’s not just meat that has skin in the game. The government is looking at what can be called “milk,” and that itself will extend into what can be called “cheese” or “yogurt,” etc.

But passing a law to protect the past isn’t going to stop progress.

Smart companies have seen the writing on the wall and decided it’s better to join ’em rather than try to beat ’em with a legislative stick. Chicken giant, Tyson, is leading the way with numerous investments in both lab-grown and plant-based meat companies, and Cargill has gotten in on the cultured meat game with an investment in Memphis Meats.

Already there are glimmers of hope that we can work through this potential morass. Memphis Meats, a leader in the lab-grown meat space, teamed up with the North American Meat Institute to send a letter to President Trump urging him to “clarify the regulatory framework for cell-based meat and poultry products,” and suggesting that the FDA and USDA collaborate on oversight of the emerging cultured meat industry. Sure, it’s only a letter, but it’s two sides from across the aisle on this debate working together. If we can get other groups to do the same, the results won’t be silly at all.

“Cellular Aquaculture” Company BlueNalu Raises $4.5 Million

By now, you’ve probably heard of cultured (or lab-grown) meat. But what about cultured seafood? That’s what BlueNalu, a San Diego-based startup, is working on.

The company is developing cellular aquaculture, in which living cells are taken from fish and grown, using culture media, to create seafood. Basically it’s cellular agriculture, but for seafood instead of beef or pork.

Today BlueNalu got some new wind in their sales: the company announced that they raised a $4.5 million seed round. New Crop Capital led the round, with participation by 25 VC firms and individuals from the U.S., U.K., Hong Kong, Luxembourg, and Israel (a country which is turning out to be a hotbed of clean meat innovation).

This news is pretty impressive, considering the company was just established two months ago. It also indicates a strong interest in clean seafood. BlueNalu isn’t the only company working in the space; Wild Type is currently developing cultured salmon and Finless Foods is working on lab-grown bluefin tuna. So far this year, both companies have each raised $3.5 million.

There’s no word yet on whether BlueNalu will try to develop their own clean seafood product or license out their cellular aquaculture tech to other companies. But the amount of money they raised mean that people (this reporter included) are pretty excited to see just what exactly cellular aquaculture can do.

Higher Steaks is Developing Cultured Pork for the Masses

When it rains, it pours. In 2013 Dr. Mark Post made the first ever lab-grown burger, and five years later cultured meat (also known as lab-grown or clean meat) seems to be everywhere you turn. It’s the subject of global conferences and pleas to President Trump, and there are more startups in the field every day.

Which means that people are buzzing about which company will be the first to bring cultured meat to market. Higher Steaks, the London-based startup founded in early 2018 by Benjamina Bollag and Dr. Stephanie Wallis, isn’t trying to produce a marketable clean meat product before anyone else. Instead, their focus is on making it super scalable.

To do that, they’re working to find a way to make cultured animal tissue quickly and affordably. “We’re making sure all of our innovation is working towards making the process industrial-sized,” said Bollag. Specifically, as with most cellular agriculture companies, they’re working towards optimizing production and reducing cost.

This is where the co-founders’ skill sets will come in handy. Bollag studied chemical engineering at Imperial College London before launching her own retail company. She stumbled on the concept of clean meat while part of a cohort for Entrepreneur First in London and soon afterwards met and teamed up with Wallis, who has degrees in neuroscience and stem cell regeneration. They also have help from David Hay, the Chair of Tissue Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. Together, they hope they have the scientific expertise and business strategy needed to make it in the emerging (and competitive) clean meat industry.

Originally, Higher Steaks was planning to develop a cultured foie gras as their first product to market, but decided to switch to pork. “We moved from niche to more broad,” said Bollag. Here is where Wallis’ experience in pluripotent stem cells, which can morph to become any type of cell, is critical: “Pig is the most similar to humans,” she said. “The processes that you use to create these cells from humans are more likely to be successful when you’re using pigs than other animals.”

This is helpful because there’s quite a lot of medical research (and funding) around growing human tissue through stem cell engineering, specifically for organ replacements. The theory is that this technology will apply more easily to pork, which is similar to human tissue, than it would to, say, duck or venison.

The founders of Higher Steaks told me that their first product would probably be ground pork, maybe sausage. Optimistically, they’re hoping to bring it to market by 2021 — which includes about a year and a half waiting period for food safety approval. This timing is in line with other clean meat companies like Memphis Meats and Mosa Meat.

Higher Steaks’ choice to focus on pork is unique. JUST, who claims they’ll bring a cultured meat product to company by the end of this year, is working on poultry, as is Iraeli startup Supermeat. Mosa Meat and Aleph Farms are focusing on beef. Memphis Meats made a cultured pork meatball as a proof of concept in 2016, but has since shifted its work to chiefly poultry. If Higher Steaks succeeds in creating scalable lab-grown pork, they could take a huge bite out of the meat market — not just in Europe, but globally.

Bollag recognizes the global implications of cultured meat technology. She took the podium at the FDA meeting on cultured meat earlier this month to speak about regulating this new food. When I called her to debrief about the meeting, she emphasized the need for collaboration between regulatory bodies and cellular agriculture startups around the world. “We’re global companies, and the safety standards need to be global, too.”

Once Higher Steaks and the other cellular agriculture startups racing towards making clean meat scalable and affordable can reach their goal, that is.

Traditional Meat Producers Lobby Trump Over Cultured Meat

About a decade ago, “disruption” was the big buzzword. Though it was (way) overused, there were some examples of startups that truly disrupted the status quo and changed entire industries. Think: Uber and taxis, or AirBnB and hotels. And now, from what it looks like, traditional meat producers in the U.S. are seeing the writing on the wall when it comes to lab-grown meat — and are taking steps to stave off their own disruption.

Agricultural professional groups including the American Sheep Industry Association, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, National Chicken Council, National Pork Producers Council and the National Turkey Federation fired off a letter to President Trump today, asking for parity when it comes to the regulation of cultured meat. From that letter:

“At a recent public meeting held by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which excluded USDA and at which FDA indicated it plans to assert itself as the primary regulator of cell-cultured products, a representative of a cell-cultured protein company stated, ‘Our beef is beef, our chicken is chicken.’ If that is so, then cell-cultured protein products that purport to be meat or poultry should be subject to the same comprehensive inspection system that governs other amenable meat and poultry products to ensure they are wholesome and safe for consumption, and to ensure they are labeled and marketed in a manner that provides a level playing field in the marketplace.”

This letter follows a petition from the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association in February of this year asking the USDA: To Exclude Product Not Derived Directly from Animals Raised and Slaughtered from the Definition of “Beef” and “Meat.” Basically, the argument is that the only thing you can call “beef” (and other specific meat types) is that which was born, raised and killed.

There’s a lot to unpack here. First, there is the issue of which regulatory body should oversee and set up rules around cultured meat. Traditional meat producers want it to be the USDA. But the USDA typically provides oversight of meat at the point of slaughter, and the point of lab-grown meat is to bypass animal slaughter altogether.

As Quartz points out, falling under USDA regulation would put cultured meat companies at a political disadvantage next to traditional meat producers, who have built up more clout with the agency.

For its part, The Good Food Institute (GFI), a non-profit that supports plant-based meat and dairy alternatives, responded publicly today advocating for FDA involvement, writing:

“The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has demonstrated the expertise necessary to provide adequate oversight of clean meat. Additionally, it is clear that FDA will have authority over most or all varieties of clean meat fish. Given that the methods of production will be the same, splitting oversight of the same process between two agencies would be duplicative and costly. So it makes sense that FDA would regulate clean beef, chicken, and pork as well.”

Ultimately, however, GFI said it would work with whichever agency was chosen.

In the press release announcing its letter to the president, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association used very Trump-ian language, calling lab-grown meat “fake meat,” and referring to the FDA’s recent moves as a “power grab.”

But all the sturm and drang from traditional meat producers feels a bit like an argument with a significant other over how they load the dishwasher. At some point, it’s not about how you place the bowls in the upper rack, it’s about something else — something deeper that’s been brewing inside.

Today’s letter to Trump comes at a time when the United States is sitting on 2.5 billion pounds of excess meat chilling in cold storage as a result of retaliatory tariffs from other U.S. meat importing countries, and at a time when the government is preparing to give $12 billion in aid to farmers impacted by the administration’s trade war.

Traditional meat producers have to deal with all of this today, and they have to worry about what can be grown in a petri dish tomorrow. That’s a tough spot to be in, but I can’t tell how many of these protestations are genuine and how many are just out of self-preserving fear. We should have a discussion about how we label the food we ingest! But if a startup can grow a steak in a lab without having to spend time, money and natural resources on raising an animal, we shouldn’t stymie that progress over picayune details.

Some traditional meat companies are investing these disruptive startups. Tyson Ventures, of the Tyson chicken company invested in Future Meat and Memphis Meats. Memphis Meats is also funded by agriculture giant, Cargill.

So is the smarter play to be a friend or foe to this meat disruption? Hopefully we won’t have to wait a decade to find out.

Catch Video from the New Harvest Cultured Meat Conference

You can tell a market sector is heating up when it gets its own conference. Cellular agriculture, which includes cultured meat (or lab meat or clean meat or whatever you want to call it) is definitely getting hotter as people gather today and tomorrow at the New Harvest 2018 conference over at MIT.

New Harvest is a non-profit advocacy group for the advancement of research into products like cultured meat, and its conference bills itself as “the world’s first conference dedicated to cellular agriculture.” If you are at all interested in the future of cultured meat and alterna-proteins, this looks like the place to be, with a tremendous lineup of researchers and exhibitors.

Startup activity in the cultured meat space has been downright frothy. Memphis Meats, Mosa Meat, JUST, Aleph Farms, and Supermeat are all working on cultured meat, and even traditional animal protein giant Tyson is getting into the lab meat space with its investment in Future Meat. And that list doesn’t even include the plant-based meat companies coming to market like Impossible and Beyond Meat.

Cultured meat has also caught the eye of the government, with the FDA recently holding a public meeting over what to call cultured meat (as well as the agency’s intent to crack down on which products can be called “milk“). Traditional ranchers and farmers have a beef with these upstarts who want to label their products, well, “beef.” This debate is just beginning, and conferences like New Harvest help push the conversation and research forward to move cellular agriculture from the lab to our tables.

If you can’t be in the Boston area for this weekend’s conference, you can check out video from the talks here. I should note, the video is broadcast via Periscope and the quality is definitely not HD. We’ve embedded a sample below, and you can check out all the talks here courtesy of the Cultured Meat and Future Food podcast.