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Six years later, his company Future Meat Technologies regularly makes news for reaching ever lower price milestones for his cell-based chicken. And according to Nahmias, he’s only getting started.
The following is my full conversation with Nahmias.
Subscribers to Spoon Plus can get access to this full interview. You can learn more about Spoon Plus here.
Something was bothering Yaakov Nahmias.
The longtime bioengineer had been sitting alongside the Charles River near MIT drinking coffee when he got a call from an investor in Israel who wanted to know what he thought about Mark Post’s famous quarter-million euro hamburger.
“I told him, it’s probably the silliest idea I’ve ever heard,” said Nahmias, who also goes by Koby, in an interview with The Spoon.
It wasn’t the science itself Nahmias thought was silly – the longtime bioengineer knew making a burger in a lab was an impressive scientific feat – but rather the idea that consumers would pay hundreds of dollars, let alone hundreds of thousands, for a burger no matter how science-forward meat the meat is.
Sitting there, Nahmias began to think about what it would take to bring down the cost of growing meat in a bioreactor to result in prices approachable enough for the average consumer.
It wouldn’t be easy. As the founding director of the Alexander Grass Center for Bioengineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a longtime consultant to the pharma industry, Nahmias knew that this type of complicated biotech cell-reproduction work was hugely expensive and – the way things were structured back in 2015 – totally impractical for producing low-cost consumables.
But Nahmias also thought that maybe it didn’t need to be this way. After all, he had colleagues who ran an insect farm, which had a much lower cost per unit of biomass produced. So why, he wondered, was creating meat using cellular agriculture so much more expensive than other forms of biomass production?
One reason was that cells produced make a lots of toxins like ammonia. And, unlike insects which have livers to remove these toxins, cells produced in bioreactors “essentially grow in their own urine,” Nahmias said.
When he looked around for systems are good at ammonia removal, the obvious example was the aquarium.
“If you’re growing fish, and and you are giving them too much food, there is too much protein that breaks down into ammonia,” said Nahmias. “The only way to treat it is by adding zeolites that will bind the ammonia relatively fast. So using that type of insight, you can design a process that will do it at scale.”
Another early insight Nahmias had was that pharma bioreactors often grew one type of animal cell – hamster ovary cells – which are commonly used for vaccine development. While hamster cells grow easily in traditional bioreactors, that’s not the case with meat like beef or chicken.
But perhaps the biggest challenge Nahmias saw was the cost of growth medium used to feed the cells. After consulting to the pharma industry for the last decade, he knew it took about 10 liters of culture medium to make 1 kilogram of biomass. At what he estimated to be $20 per liter for medium at that time, he thought even with the world’s most advanced tech, they’d start hit a cost floor of around $200 per kilogram.
He would spend the next six months focused on reengineering the process of cell-based meat production. But this was only the beginning. Nahmias knew that it would take some time to commercialize his work.
So not long after, he would start a company called SuperMeat with a couple of other cofounders, where he further developed these early ideas. That company would eventually split up a year later and Nahmias would go on to found his current company, Future Meat Technologies, where he set about creating a scaled system for making low-cost cell-based meat.
Fast forward to today and he’s doing just that. Future Meat regularly makes news about reaching ever lower prices for its cell-based chicken, which is why I wanted to talk to him about how he achieved cost milestones that many have thought wouldn’t be achievable for at least half a decade.
You can listen to my full interview with Nahmias on the latest episode of The Food Tech Show. Just click play below or get the episode at Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
CPG giant Nestlé intends to enter the cultured meat market via a partnership with Israel-based alt-protein company Future Meat, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Unnamed sources familiar with the matter said Nestlé is working on various products that mix its own plant-based proteins with cultivated meat from Future Meat.
More granular details on the deal, such as specific products are not available at this time. Future Meat recently opened what it says is the world’s first production facility for cultured meat. The plant, located in Future Meat’s hometown of Rehovot, Israel, can produce 500 kilograms of cultured meat per day, or the equivalent to about 5,000 hamburgers, according to the company. The new facility is currently processing cultured chicken, pork, and lamb. Beef production is also in the works.
Future Meat’s end products will be a combination of cultivated and plant-based protein, which is exactly what Nestlé is aiming for in its deal with the company. Future Meat told the Spoon recently that its products are currently 45 to 75 percent cultured meat, with an edible scaffold made of plant protein.
Earlier this year, Future Meat told The Spoon it has been able to decrease the cost of cultured meat production by 1,000x over the last three years. At last check, the company had brought the cost of its cultured chicken breast down to $7.50 USD per quarter-pound serving. It followed that up with news that the production price could drop to $2 within the next 12 to 18 months.
Actual product launches for both Future Meat and Nestlé are contingent on the companies getting regulatory approvals. Currently, Future Meat is working to get regulatory approval here in the U.S., with the goal of selling its products in foodservice venues next year. A partnership with a major CPG like Nestlé may boost the company’s ambitions in this area.
Cultivated meat company Aleph Farms announced today it has completed a $105 million Series B round of funding, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $118 million. The Series B round was led by L Catterton and DisruptAD with participation from Skyviews Life Science, Thai Union, BRF, and CJ CheilJedang. Existing investors VisVires New Protein, Strauss Group, Cargill, Peregrine Ventures, and CPT Capital also participated in the round.
Israel-based Aleph Farms said the new funds will go towards increasing manufacturing, growing operations internationally, and expanding product lines. Currently, the company is developing a cultivated beef steak and will unveil a prototype for that product in November at the Agri-Food Innovation Summit.
There is of course an enormous difference between unveiling a prototype and making these whole-muscle cuts of cultivated meat at scale. One of the challenges for cultivated meat companies is being able to produce large quantities of product at a cost that is on par with traditional meat. Aleph Farms launched a new production process at the end of 2020 that will eventually be able to reach that price parity, according to the company.
The process is the first part of a phased build-out for Aleph’s forthcoming pilot production facility, which the company says will be operational by 2022. Aleph Farms also plans to do an initial market launch at that time. The Series B funding will, in bigger-picture terms, go towards helping the company realize that goal.
Aleph’s announcement today follows recent news from other cultivated meat companies that are also opening pilot production facilities and also aiming for commercial launches in 2022. That includes MeaTech 3D, also based in Israel and also developing whole cuts of cultivated meat. Another Israeli company, Future Meat, has already opened its facility and says it plans to sell cultivated meat in the U.S. by 2022.
Before anyone sells anything, however, these companies must get regulatory approval for each market they want to enter. So far, just one company, Eat Just, has regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat, and that’s only in Singapore. Along with price parity, getting regulatory approval is a major topic in the cultivated meat conversation these days.
Aleph Farms says it is working with regulatory agencies, though the company did not specify for which markets. Part of the company’s international expansion will be to the United Arab Emirates and the wider Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region. Aleph said it is also evaluating the possibility of a manufacturing facility located in the UAE.
Future Meat has officially opened what it says is the world’s first production facility for cultured meat. The plant, located in the company’s hometown of Rehovot, Israel, is a big step in accelerating Future Meat’s timeline for getting regulatory approval to sell cultured meat and then actually getting products onto consumers’ plates.
Future Meat says the plant can produce 500 kilograms of cultured meat per day, which is equivalent to roughly 5,000 hamburgers. Those numbers may pale in comparison to traditional meat (this McDonald’s factory produces 5 million burgers every day), but for the extremely nascent cultured meat industry, they make for significant progress.
Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientific officer of Future Meat Technologies, told The Spoon that the new facility is currently processing cultured chicken, pork, and lamb. Beef production will arrive soon. The company’s first official products to come out of the facility will be a cultured chicken breast, chicken fingers, and hamburgers.
Earlier this year, Future Meat told The Spoon it has been able to decrease the cost of cultured meat production by 1,000x over the last three years. At last check, the company had brought the cost of its cultured chicken breast down to $7.50 USD per quarter-pound serving. It followed that up with news that the production price could drop to $2 within the next 12 to 18 months.
Future Meat’s end products will be a combination of cell-cultured and plant-based protein. Nahmias said that his company’s products are 45 to 75 percent cultured meat, with an edible scaffold made of plant protein. Cell-based protein will replace plant-based elements in future generations of product as the cost of cultured meat continues to decrease.
No technologies out there, he said, use 100 percent cultured meat. “Meat is composed of cells and a three-dimensional protein scaffold that holds the cells together. Companies are either adding the edible scaffold to the cells or adding the cells to the edible scaffold. It is pretty much the same.”
Importantly, Future Meat has also developed a serum-free growth medium for feeding cells. This allows the company to avoid using the controversial fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is both expensive and ethically controversial. According to Nahmias, Future Meat’s medium is made up of a mixture of amino acids, oils, glucose, and naturally occurring hormones. “Removing serum is a critics step in market realization of cultured meat,” he said. “Companies that fail to do that require the slaughter of dozens of calves to grow a single hamburger.” The company’s chicken, lamb, and pork cells are currently growing “in scale” without serum at the production facility.
Future Meat may be the first to open the doors on a production facility for cultured meat, but others won’t be long in coming. Bioprinting startup MeaTech 3D, also based in Israel, says it will have a production facility operational by 2022. San Francisco, California-based Wildtype also opened a production facility this week, though it is focused solely on cultured seafood at the moment and is therefore not a direct competitor to Future Meat.
Down the line, Future Meat would like to open another production facility, ideally in the United States. For now, Future Meat is working to get regulatory approval here in the U.S., with the goal of selling its products in foodservice venues next year.
This week, Future Meat Technologies announced that it was able to reduce the production price of 110 grams of its cultured chicken breast to $4 (h/t Plant Based News). This is the second time this year that Future Meat technologies has the lowered the production price of its cultivated protein, after having reduced the price of a quarter-pound of cultured chicken breast to $7.50 in February.
This significant price drop will help bring Future Meat closer to price parity with conventional chicken and bring its first product to market. The company’s CEO, Rom Kshuk, said that the production price could drop to $2 within the next 12-18, and within that same timeframe, the company hopes to launch its product in the U.S. market.
Like other cultured meat companies, Future Meat extracts animal cells and replicates them in large bioreactors. However, the company is different from others because it uses a blend of both plant-based and animal-based ingredients for its cultured meat product.
Cultured meat is expensive to make, so many companies are racing to reach price parity with traditional meat. A consumer may choose to buy alternative meat products for ethical, environmental, and health reasons, but often, the cost of food is the driving factor in our purchasing decisions. According to The Spoon’s publisher, Michael Wolf, several things need to happen to reduce the production cost of cultured meat, including the optimization of the commercial process, bigger and better bioreactors, and a reduction in the price of growth mediums. Once companies like Future Meat reach price parity, this will allow cultured meat to become commercially viable.
Though where cultured meat could become commercially viable is another matter altogether, as Singapore remains the only country that has allowed the sale of cultivated meat. In December, Eat Just was the first company in the world to sell cultured meat at a restaurant in Singapore, and recently entered into a partnership with meal delivery service foodpanda to offer home delivery of cultured meat. Aleph Farms has plans to bring cultured meat to both Brazil and Japan. SuperMeat currently has a restaurant/tasting facility where customers cannot pay but can try cultured meat in exchange for feedback.
Future Meat has been looking for regulatory approval in multiple countries, but it has yet to announce any approvals.
Berkley, California-based New Age Meats (NAM) has raised another $2 million seed extension round following a previous extension of the same amount last year.
This round was led by “a very large, significant industry player” in Asia that must remain confidential, NAM said in a press release. The round also included participation from Litani Ventures’ Peter Rahal, ff VC, SOSV, and Innovating Capital, as well as new investments by San Diego Tech Coast Angels, BeniVC, Oceanic Partners, Deep Ventures, and Climate Capital.
NAM, a graduate of the IndieBio accelerator program, is currently developing what the company calls “hybrid cultivated and plant-based meat” that for now includes pork sausages and dumplings. Its current process is to grow meat from cells collected from the animal, then adds plant-based elements for additional taste, texture, and nutritional profile.
The blended approach to cultured meat is arguably one that can both get companies’ products to market faster and help them reach price parity with traditional meat products. Another company, Israel-based Future Meat, also uses this tactic, and in a recent interview with The Spoon, CEO Rom Kshuk called it “low-hanging fruit” when it comes to price parity and scalability.
NAM’s own CEO, Brian Spears, said in a statement today that his company is “relentlessly focused” on driving down costs and scaling production. “Ultimately, we will fail if our products are too expensive and low volume to be served anywhere but luxury restaurants,” he said.
This new funding will allow NAM to continue building up its team, which includes former staffers from Impossible Foods. The company is also preparing for a Series A round “in the coming months,” though no detailed timeframe was given.
NAM has raised a total of $7 million to date.
Future Meat Technologies announced today it has brought the production cost of its cultured chicken breast product to under $10. The company has also raised an additional $26.75 million in capital to scale up production and get its product into market in the next 12 to 18 months.
Reaching cost parity with traditional meat is a vital step in the process of bringing cultured meat to the wider public. Speaking via a video chat today, Future Meat CEO Rom Kshuk said that getting to price parity with traditional meat has been part of his company’s mission statement from the start. Future Meat, he said has been able to “decrease cost by 1,000 times over the last three years.” As of now, a quarter-pound serving of its cultured chicken breast costs just $7.50 to produce.
Future Meat differs from many alt-protein companies in that it uses a blend of cultured and plant-based ingredients for its products, rather than choosing one or the other, as most companies do. This, Kshuk explained, is something of a “low-hanging fruit” approach since companies can typically get to market faster with a blended product as opposed to developing one that is 100 percent cultured. Kshuk said that right now, Future Meat will “use the best of both worlds” where these two approaches are concerned, though that balance will skew more towards exclusively cultured meat products in future.
For plant-based proteins, the company uses a mixture of the leading products on the market (soy, pea, fungi). Plant-based protein tends to provide a better texture and nutritional profile to food items than cultured protein, which is one advantage to using the former. However, the plant-based approach comes up lacking in terms of what Kshuk calls “the sensory experience” of the meat: flavor, aroma, etc. Those are elements cultured meat is better able to provide, for now at least.
At the moment, Future Meat is focused on scaling up its production, planning its approach to market, and trying to get a team on the ground in the U.S. It plans to launch in the U.S. by 2022. Initially, that will likely happen through two channels: restaurants and direct-to-consumer sales. The latter could be an especially lucrative format, given the rise in D2C commerce brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The recent fundraise will bolster all of these efforts. The $26.75 million funding round is a convertible note with participation from new investors that include German dairy producer Müller Group, ADM Capital, and CPG Rich Products Corp. Existing investors Tyson Foods, Archer Daniels Midland, S2G Ventures, Manta Ray Investors, Emerald Technology Ventures, and Bits x Bites participated, too.
Future meat expects its pilot facility to start production in the first half of 2021 and is also seeking regulatory approval in multiple territories.
Cultured meat and alternative protein are out to disrupt the meat industry. But Future Meat‘s Chief Science Officer Yaakov Nahmias says the quickest way to achieve that goal is through the infrastructure that’s already in place, including farmers. Nahmias sees poultry, pork and beef producers as a critical partnership for cultured meat start-ups and the meat industry’s transition.
During an interview two weeks ago, Nahmias said he envisions a role for what he calls hybrid farmers: Traditional livestock producers who invest in a bioreactor, a large steel vat that maintains the environment need for cells to grow and divide, allowing them to culture meat. Farmers could continue to raise livestock and simultaneously take advantage of the efficiency and safety advantages of cultured meat, Nahmias told me in an interview.
It takes between six weeks and six months for a chicken to reach market weight. Cattle require 14 to 22 months. But if a farmer were to invest in cultured meat, they could also produce a new crop of cultured meat every couple of weeks. Nahmias estimates that a bioreactor the size of a standard refrigerator could generate the mass of 100 chickens every two weeks. And farmers could easily vary the type of meat they’re growing from batch to batch based on demand. “You have the ability to do chicken today, pork for Christmas, and turkey for Thanksgiving and beef for Memorial Day,” he said.
There will always be a market for traditional agriculture, but this is a way for farmers to diversify, Nahmias told me. On top of faster production and the ability to grow a variety of meats, cultured meat also has a shorter supply chain because there’s no slaughter step. Farmers could sell directly to processors and packers. And maybe most importantly, hybrid farmers would have access to a new customer base–those buyers looking for animal-free protein.
There’s also a safety and efficiency advantage to cultured meat. Viruses can do serious damage to a flock or herd before they’ve even been detected, costing producers months of work and investment. But bioreactors– at least the ones manufactured by Future Meat– will offer real-time detection. A contamination would cost a farmer a couple weeks instead of months or whole animals, Nahmias said.
Culturing meat does have its limitations, like the fact that it’s not yet possible to produce high value cuts of meat like steaks, chicken breasts and pork chops in a bioreactor. Future Meat grows muscle and fat cells in separate bioreactors and then combines them using extrusion technology to give the desired texture. Other start-ups grow the fat and muscle cells concomitantly, but the outcome is the same: a ground product. There are companies developing ways to culture whole muscles, but that technology is a decade away from commercial application.
Nahmias acknowledges that right now farmers feel threatened by the alternative protein industry and cultured meat. “But they are threatened the same way horse cart drivers were threatened by the car,” he said. The car was a major investment, but in the long term it offered greater financial stability. In other words, the mode of production might be changing, but there’s still room for farmers to be involved.
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.”
There has been a lot of activity and investment in the lab-grown meat, or “cultured” meat space in the past year. Enough so that it has attracted the attention of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which announced today that it will be holding a public meeting about cultured meat technology next month.
For the uninitiated, cultured meat is animal tissue grown in a lab setting. It’s typically made through the use of starter cells from the animal, which are then developed in some kind of medium (often fetal bovine serum) in a bioreactor, then scaffolded to provide shape or texture.
Ethical and environmental issues with raising animals for slaughter and consumption have driven much of the competition and advancement in the cultured meat space, with Memphis Meats, SuperMeat, Future Meat, Aleph Farms and JUST among the leaders of this new type of food.
While it was once ridiculously expensive to grow meat in a lab, the large number of players and technological developments in the space are bringing that price down, and it seems that the FDA wants to be fully prepared before cultured meat makes it to the grocery aisle.
A meeting entitled “Foods Produced Using Animal Cell Culture Technology” will be held on July 12 in College Park, Maryland. From the FDA’s site:
The public meeting will give interested parties and the public an opportunity to comment on these emerging food technologies. Specifically, the agency is asking for input, relevant data and information on the following questions:
In a statement, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, M.D., and FDA Deputy Commissioner Anna Abram said that they want to “help foster dialogue regarding these emerging food technologies.” It went on to assert the USDA’s jurisdiction over cultured meat because, well, cultured meat is food, after all.
In reaction to the FDA’s announcement today, The Good Food Institute, which helps promote the work being done on clean meat, released a statement of its own saying “We are heartened to see that FDA is engaged in thinking through how clean meat can come to market under the existing regulatory framework. We are also encouraged that the FDA commissioner has acknowledged the benefits of clean meat, including animal welfare and environmental impacts. The United States has a robust food regulatory regime that is more than capable of ensuring that clean meat is safe and truthfully labeled.”
Speaking of labels, the FDA said this meeting will also include what we should actually label lab-grown meat. Cultured meat has raised the hackles of traditional meat producers who do not want the waters of what we consume muddied. Earlier this year, the United States Cattlemen’s Association filed a petition with the USDA asking for beef labeling requirements. The Cattlemen were specifically asking that “…any product labeled as “beef” come from cattle that have been born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner, rather than coming from alternative sources such as a synthetic product from plant, insects, or other non-animal components and any product grown in labs from animal cells.”
If our recent “Future of Meat” meetup in Seattle is any indication, the public meeting next month promises to be a rousing event, and more importantly, the start of a broader discussion around alternative meats. If you’re going, be sure to drop us a line and tell us how it went.
Tyson just announced a new name on the list of alterna-meat manufacturers it backs: Future Meat.
Tyson co-led the Israeli based startup’s $2.2 million seed round, in which the Neto Group, S2G Ventures, BitsXBites, and Agrinnovation also participated.
Future Meat manufactures animal fat and muscle cells for meat without ever having to actually raise and slaughter animals, and without genetic modification. Right now, this is a fairly expensive process: current production costs are $10,000 per kilogram, according to the company’s Chief Scientist, Yaakov Nahmias.”We redesigned the manufacturing process until we brought it down to $800 per kilogram today, with a clear roadmap to $5-10 per kg by 2020,” he said in a press release.
If Future Meat can make that cost efficiency a reality, it could very well be an enormous advantage for the company in terms of how it stacks up to competitors. And as one expert noted earlier this year, price and taste are two crucial factors for any company looking to make an impact in alterna meats.
The company is also looking to get away from using fetal bovine serum, which is widely known as the key to lab-grown meat right now. No doubt some of the new funds—which Future Meat says are for engineering activities and biological research—will go into developing an alternative element. Future Meat is currently looking for engineers, chefs, and scientists.
The company is one of a growing number of startups and initiatives making alternative forms of meat a reality. Memphis Meats, another Tyson investment, also makes lab-grown meat and raised an undisclosed sum at the beginning of 2018. And last summer, JUST (formerly Hampton Creek), said it would bring lab-grown meat to market by the end of this year. There’s also Integriculture, who not only makes clean meat but is also trying to develop “agricultural-scale cell culture” for uses beyond food.
Meanwhile, it seems there’s a “clean meat revolution” happening in Israel. The country is home to not just Future meat, but also SuperMeat, who recently raised $3 million Meanwhile, Soglowek, a big-time meat producer in Israel, just announced its plans to donate 20 percent of profits to SuperMeat, in addition to launching its own plant-based meat label.
None of this is very coincidental, since Israel is both a leader in tissue engineering and home to the largest number of vegans per capita in the world. And with companies like Tyson and Soglowek backing both lab-grown and plant-based meat concepts, it’s looking like the future of meat is less of an either-or scenario and more about finding the most sustainable, cost-effective, and tasty alternative.
