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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Future Meat

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Hybrid Farmers: Could Livestock Producers Expand Cultured Meat?

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FDA to Hold Public Meeting on Cultured Meat

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:

  • What considerations specific to animal cell culture technology would be appropriate to include in evaluation of food produced by this method of manufacture?
  • What kinds of variations in manufacturing methods would be relevant to safety for foods produced by animal cell culture technology?
  • What kinds of substances would be used in the manufacture of foods produced using animal cell culture technology and what considerations would be appropriate in evaluating the safety of these uses?
  • Are the potential hazards associated with production of foods using animal cell culture technology different from those associated with traditional food production/processing?
  • Is there a need for unique control measures to address potential hazards associated with production of foods using animal cell culture technology?

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 Leads $2.2 Million Investment for Israeli Startup Future Meat

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.