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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

fat

Cell Ag Startup Mission Barns Raises $24M for its Cultivated Fat

Mission Barns, a cellular agriculture startup creating cultured fat, announced today that it has raised a $24 million Series A round of funding. Investors in the round include Lever VC, Gullspang Re:Food, Humboldt Fund, Green Monday Ventures, and Enfini Ventures. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Mission Barns to more than $28 million.

Mission Barns is focused on cultivating animal fat, just without the animal. The company’s technology starts with pork, poultry or beef cells and grows them using plant-based feedstock in a cultivator. The result, the company says, is an animal fat that brings the same mouthfeel and flavor of meat without animal slaughter, and does so in a more environmentally friendly way than conventional animal agriculture.

Mission Barns has developed its own meat as well as in collaboration with other meat and plant protein partners. The company says applications include bacon, breakfast patties, burgers, nuggets, and more. In August of last year, Mission Barns held curbside taste tests of its cell-based bacon outside restaurants in San Francisco and Oakland, California.

The alternative fat space has steadily been growing over the past year, with a number of startups developing their own technology. Here in the U.S., Motif Foodworks is developing its own plant-based fat. Hoxton Farms is working on cultivated fat in the U.K. And in Australia, Nourish Ingredients is using yeast fermentation to create plant-based fat.

In today’s press announcement, Mission Barns says that it will use the new funding to scale up its production and build a pilot production facility in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Barcelona’s Cubiq Foods Raises €5M to Produce Better-for-You Cultured Fat

Cubiq Foods, a Barcelona-based startup making cultured fats for food products, announced today that it had raised €5 million ($5.4 million) from Blue Horizon Ventures and Moira Capital Partners (h/t Tech.eu). This bumps the company’s total amount of funding up to €17 million ($18.4 million).

Founded in 2018, Cubiq Foods cultivates fats and fat/water emulsions for use in industrial food products. The process is very similar to what companies are doing with cultured meat, only they’re doing it with fat. Specifically, Cubiq Foods makes oils that are rich in omega-3s, which have a laundry list of health benefits.

With its new funding, Cubiq Foods will scale up the production of its fats to industrial levels. It aims to make its cell-based fats commercially available to companies around the world by the end of 2020.

In addition to its omega-3 fat, Cubiq also converts liquid oils — like olive oil — into solids, which are intended as replacements for vegan fats like coconut oil. This could have real benefits in plant-based meat, specifically. Many options on the market right now, like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, use coconut oil to give their ground “beef” a juicy richness. Coconut oil is high in saturated fat, which can raise cholesterol levels. Adding Cubiq Foods’ new fats to their products could help plant-based meat companies make their foods more healthy and better fight critiques around health they’ve struggled against over the past year.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, plant-based meat has been getting more attention than ever — and attracting a boatload of funding, to boot. In this climate, I doubt that Cubiq Foods will have difficulty finding alternative protein companies to partner up with.