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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

GOOD meat

José Andrés Serves Up Cultivated Chicken in Honor of Willem van Eelen, The ‘Godfather of Cultivated Meat’

A couple of days after the first sale of cultivated meat this weekend in San Francisco, news of José Andrés serving up GOOD Meat on the opposite coast landed in my inbox.

According to the release, Andrés served charcoal-grilled cultivated chicken last night to a hand-picked group of diners. The dinner included cultivated chicken marinated with anticucho sauce, native potatoes, and ají Amarillo chimichurri, and precedes China Chilcano’s menu debut of the dish, which will be served weekly in limited quantities and by reservation only later this summer.

The meal was served in honor of the late Willem van Eelen, known as the “godfather of cultivated meat,” on what would have been his 100th birthday yesterday, July 4, 2023. After hearing a lecture on preserving meat, van Eelen, a WW2 prisoner of war, came up with the idea of creating meat outside of the body of an animal. Over the following decades, van Eelen would start businesses to save money to pursue this idea while working on it and filing for patents. He would pass away in 2015 at the age of 91, just two years after Dutch startup Mosa Meat would be the first to realize his idea with their cultured meat hamburger.

GOOD Meat invited van Eelen’s daughter Ira and his grandson Kick (both pictured above) to the tasting.

“I am grateful that a promise my father made decades ago has come true. I’m so happy we can stop talking about it and go eat it, because tasting is believing,” said Ira van Eelen. “This is the meat we love and trust, just made in a better way.”

The sale of GOOD Meat’s cultivated chicken a day after his birthday was not the only synchronous event for the van Eelen family this week. On the same day, the government of his home country approved a ‘code of practice’ to allow tastings of cultivated meat to occur within tightly regulated environments.

Alt Protein Enters New Era as USDA Approves Sale of Cultivated Chicken By UPSIDE & GOOD Meat

Today marks a big day for cultivated meat as two companies, UPSIDE Foods and Good Meat, announced today that they had received approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to sell their cultivated meat products to consumers.

According to UPSIDE, the news came in the form of notification from the USDA that they have received a “grant of inspection” (GOI) from USDA, which means the company has met the applicable federal requirements and standards to operate as a meat establishment and is allowed to process, package, and sell our cultivated chicken in the United States under the inspection of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

UPSIDE says that with this news, they have passed all three of the requisite milestones necessary to sell its meat – 1) “No Questions” Letter from FDA — November 2022, 2) USDA Label Approval — June 2023, and 3) today’s GOI notification.

With the latest news, the company says they are starting manufacturing of meat and scaling up production at their EPIC facility. They plan to start selling the meat soon at San Francisco’s Bar Crenn through their partnership with 3-Michelin Star chef Dominique Crenn.

Not to be outdone, GOOD Meat – the cultivated meat division of Eat Just – plans to sell its first cultivated meat in the U.S. through a partnership with Chef José Andrés. According to the company, the sale of their cultivated meat product was greenlighted with the news that the USDA has given the company approval for its first poultry product to enter interstate commerce in the U.S. According to GOOD Meat, the sale of its product will take place at a yet-to-be-disclosed restaurant in Washington, D.C.

For GOOD Meat, the news marks the second country approval for the company will begin selling its cultivated meat product. The company achieved a global first in late 2020 by selling its cultivated chicken in Singapore.

Today’s news is truly a watershed event for the alt protein space. After billions of dollars spent across the industry for research and development, commercialization, and production, we will finally see the first cultivated products sold to U.S. consumers.

However, despite today’s news, everyday consumers may still have a bit of a wait. Cultivated meat products are still being made in small quantities and will first be sold in the most exclusive of restaurants, and it might be a while before we see it at the corner grocery store.

A Tale of Two Startups: Why Cultivated Meat is So Close (And Yet so Far) From Disrupting Animal Ag

Last week, two contrasting stories painting very different pictures emerged from the cultivated meat industry.

The first highlighted the news that GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat arm of Eat Just, had received a “no questions” letter from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its cultivated meat product. This makes the company the second to gain FDA approval after UPSIDE Foods, demonstrating the industry’s proximity to finally bringing meat produced outside of animals to consumers.

The other news came from the founder of New Age Eats, Brian Spears, who announced the company’s closure in a LinkedIn post. According to Spears, the company was far from generating revenue, and due to recent retrenchment from venture investors, it failed to raise the necessary funds to continue.

From his post:

In our regulated industry, we can’t and won’t be able to sell for a while. Without revenue, we rely on other sources of capital. Investors proved to be the most efficient way to validate whether cultivated meat would be commercially viable. Unfortunately, with recent capital market turmoil, we have been unable to attract investment.

While the stories each tells are very different, together they underscore the precarious nature of this emerging industry. On one hand, the cultivated meat industry is tantalizingly close to commercializing a business with considerable potential to help end the cruel and environmentally damaging industrial animal agriculture industry. On the other hand, it reveals that creating meat in bioreactors involves a long, challenging, and highly capital-intensive journey that will likely see many early pioneers fail or be acquired by competitors before ever selling a product.

When I talked with Po Bronson, the managing director of IndieBio, back in November, he predicted that this year would see many companies struggle to raise their next round of funding and seek buyers.

“What I think we’re going to see here is markets constrict,” Bronson said on the Spoon Podcast. “They already are constricting right now. And you’re going to see a lot of companies unable to raise their next round.”

Of course, the difficulty of raising money isn’t unique to cultivated meat companies. Pretty much every category of startup is beginning to feel the pressure nowadays, a pressure no doubt made even more acute with the recent demise of SVB. But unlike many startup categories, cultivated meat has a particularly difficult problem in that the industry has a much longer road toward revenue than many of these industries.

In fact, while many companies like GOOD Meat and UPSIDE are already pretty far down the path towards commercializing this business, the amount of production capacity available to even the most well-funded and commercially mature cultivated meat startups is still just a tiny fraction of what they will eventually need to start producing meat to make even a small dent in traditional animal agriculture. To achieve mass-production scale, billions more will be needed to expand production capacity, develop cost-effective commercialization processes and technology, and educate consumers about this new form of meat.

This is why organizations like the Good Food Institute and the startups themselves have started advocating for government funding to assist with late-stage capital. In its latest outlook on the investment landscape for alternative proteins, GFI cited investment in the electric vehicle market as a potential model for the alt protein sector:

While global public investment in alternative proteins is growing, it is a drop in the bucket compared to other public climate investments. For example, global governments committed $500 billion to renewable energy development in 2022. The United States alone committed $7.5 billion last year to build a national network of electric vehicle charging stations. To realize a sustainable, secure, and equitable protein production system, governments must increase their commitments to alternative proteins, and the current market provides an opportunity to do so. 

I think this is the right thing to do, but I’m unsure how fast we’ll see similar dollar amounts flow from the U.S. government, especially given how entrenched traditional animal agriculture is as a political force. While billions in government subsidies are certainly a possibility, it’s hardly a foregone conclusion, and most likely not something we’ll see in the next couple of years.

Where does this leave the cultivated meat industry? In the near term, we’ll see accelerating industry consolidation. Early startups with promising technology in creating a particular type of cultivated meat will get acquired, as some of the bigger companies start to roll up technology to fast-track their efforts. We’ll also see more “full stack” companies that have the different pieces of the puzzle – multiple cell lines, enabling infrastructure, sustainable and FBS-free growth media technology – as they acquire assets that come on the market at prices well below what they cost to build.

We’ll see fewer early-stage startups with intentions to create their own cultivated meat funded, and what investment dollars are left for this space will increasingly go to those building enabling technology to help accelerate the process. Over the past year, we’ve already seen more companies building pick-and-shovel technology like bioreactors, scaffolding, and growth media becoming the primary focus for investors.

Long term, the industry will need a combination of enough industry proof points and success stories to reassure investors they’ll get a return on their investment and to possibly convince the government to allocate significant resources. Unlike the electric vehicle industry, which saw mass-produced E.V.s start rolling off the production lines before President Obama pledged $2.4 billion in grants towards the industry, the cultivated meat industry is probably a decade away from mass-market production.

Still, hope shouldn’t be lost. The collective goal of these companies is too important to give up on, and while the era of easy capital is over, I think we’ll see some companies emerge from these tough times with products that will touch millions of consumers.

But the ride will definitely be bumpy.

GOOD Meat Receives Approval in Singapore to Use Serum-Free Media for Cultivated Meat Production

GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat division of Eat Just, announced today that it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) for the use of serum-free media for the production of cultivated meat.

Many in the industry believe that using animal-free growth media will not only help the cultivated meat industry achieve what is effectively its raison d’être through the severing of reliance on a cruel animal agriculture industry, but it will also lead to greater scalability, lower manufacturing costs, and a more sustainable product. It also paves the way for the production of larger quantities of real chicken made from cells.

GOOD Meat had previously obtained approval from SFA for its first chicken product in November 2020, and subsequent approval for new formats of its poultry in November 2021. With the latest regulatory approval for serum-free cultivation media, Eat Just says its cell ag meat division will soon transition to a more efficient and favorable production process.

According to the company, its chicken has been featured on menus at restaurants, in hawker stalls, and via food delivery. And now, beginning this month, diners can reserve weekly tables to try out Good Meat’s cultivated chicken at Huber’s Butchery, a Singaporean producer and supplier of meat products.

The company is also working on a Singapore production facility with production partner ABEC. According to Good Meat, the new facility will hold the largest bioreactor in the cultivated meat industry and will be able to use the serum-free production process for its cultivated meat when it opens next year.

“Not too long ago, observers thought removing serum was a major limiting step to scaling cultivated meat,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just. “I could not be prouder of our team for doing just that and receiving approval to commercialize it this week. It’s yet another step forward for our company, the cultivated meat industry, and the health of our planet.”

This week has been a big one for animal-free growth media. On Monday, Multus announced they had raised $9.5 million to fund the production of a growth media production plant. And yesterday, cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat announced they had been able to grow cultivated fat without fetal-bovine serum.

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Lines Up Partners to Scale Up Cultivated Meat Production

The great cultivated meat scale-up has begun. Or, at the very least, the game plan for one of the industry’s most high-visibility players is finally coming into view.

That startup is Eat Just, Inc., which has announced two significant partnerships for its Good Meat group, the company’s cultivated meat division, over the past week. The first partnership, announced last week, is with food/ag conglomerate ADM, which will partner with Eat Just to optimize the growth factors and nutrients in the cell culture growth media. According to the announcement, the two will work together to create a growth medium “for quality, cost and volume.”

The second partnership, announced today, is with ABEC, a biomanufacturing engineering and services company, to build out Good Meat’s manufacturing facilities. The multi-year agreement will see ABEC “design, manufacture, install and commission the largest known bioreactors for avian and mammalian cell culture.”

According to the announcement, the deal is for the production of ten 250,000-liter bioreactors, which will form the foundation for GOOD Meat’s large-scale cultivated meat facility. The production complex, which will be located in the United States, will have the capacity to produce up to 30 million pounds of cultivated meat. The new facility will initially produce chicken and beef products and have a nationwide distribution footprint.

While 30 million pounds sounds like a lot, it represents less than one-tenth of one percent of the aggregate meat consumption in the US. Still, it’s not nothing. The planned production represents a significant leap over any other announced production capacity (Upside’s pilot plant, announced last year, will eventually have a capacity of 400 thousand pounds of meat per year).

Some may dismiss these efforts as hardly making a dent in overall meat consumption but Eat Just’s Josh Tetrick and others have made it clear that the effort to scale up this industry will take decades, not years. These efforts to produce cell-cultivated meat at this scale will undoubtedly provide lessons for an industry collectively looking to figure out the science and technology of doing something that’s never been done before.

 

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Granted Regulatory Approval to Sell New Cultivated Chicken Products in Singapore

Today Eat Just announced its GOOD Meat division has received the regulatory go-ahead to sell new types of cultivated chicken products in Singapore. The company will debut one of the new formats, a chicken breast, at the JW Marriott Singapore South Beach next week.

The green light comes just over a year after the company received the world’s first approval to sell cultivated meat from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), Singapore’s regulatory authority for food safety. Soon after, GOOD Meat set a milestone by making the first commercial sale of cultivated chicken at 1880, a private restaurant/club and social impact organization in Singapore.

As part of the announcement, GOOD Meat also committed to increased investment in its cultivated meat production capacity in Singapore over the next two years. The company said the design and manufacturing of vessels and systems that will increase its cultivated meat production capacity are already underway, and they hope to have the new infrastructure operational within the next two years. Eat Just’s cultivated meat division also committed to growing its team in Singapore across manufacturing, science, and engineering as the company moves towards scaling up its production.

The latest regulatory approval is another example of Singapore’s aggressive push into alternative proteins and cultivated meat. The effort is part of the island nation’s “30 By 30” food sovereignty initiative to scale up its capability and capacity to produce 30 percent of its food supply by 2030. And it’s not just Eat Just; other future food companies such as Perfect Day and Avant Meats are investing in building out innovation centers in the country.

Compared to Singapore, the US government has been comparatively slow to foster the next generation of alternative proteins, but that looks to be changing. In October, the USDA announced a $10 million grant award to Tufts to create an Institute for Cellular Agriculture, a flagship American cultivated protein research center of excellence, which followed a $3.5 million grant to UC Davis to establish a training and research program by the National Science Foundation. At the same time, in September, the USDA began to solicit input about what it should call cultivated meat products, a signal that it is progressing towards regulatory approval of the products.

Eat Just Partners with Qatar Free Zones to Bring Cultured Meat Facility to the MENA Region

Eat Just announced today that it has partnered with Doha Venture Capital (DVC) and Qatar Free Zones Authority (QFZA) to build a cultured meat facility in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region.

The new facility will be located in the Umm Alhoul Free Zone in Qatar, and will at first house Eat Just’s cultured meat division, GOOD Meat. Eventually, the facility will accommodate Eat Just’s plant-based egg brand JUST Egg as well. In addition to those brands, the facility will also conduct research and development, engineering, and business development.

According to the press announcement, the Qatar Free Zones Authority and Qatar’s Ministry of Public Health have indicated that they will grant regulatory approval for GOOD Meat’s cultured chicken “very soon” and have formally granted an expert license for the cell-based meat. If Qatar does come through with this approval, it would be the second region in the world to approve the sale of cultured meat, following Singapore’s decision to do so in December of last year.

Gaining regulatory approval in more countries around the world is obviously a key milestone that needs to be reached in order for cultured meat to gain any sort of traction. Cell-based meat startups around the world have raised a ton of money over the past year, and the technology is rapidly maturing. But all the funding and the best technology in the world doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t allowed to sell your product.

While there are skeptics that doubt cell-based meat will ever be able to economically scale, a number of startups have made moves that aim to bring it to market. After two drastic price reductions this year, the production price of Israel-based Future Meat’s cell-based chicken is now $4 for 110g (check out our recent podcast interview with Future Meat Founder and CSO Yaakov Nahmias for more). Here in the U.S. Memphis Meats re-branded to the more consumer-friendly UPSIDE Foods and announced a partnership with the Altier Crenn restaurant in San Francisco.

Eat Just has definitely pushed its way to the front of the cultured meat pack, however. It is the first company to ever commercially sell its cultured meat, and now it will have large-scale production facilities in both Singapore and Qatar.

Air Protein, GOOD Meat, IntegriCulture Among the Semifinalists for XPRIZE’s Alt-Protein Competition

Nonprofit XPRIZE has announced 28 semifinalists teams that will move forward in the Feed the Next Billion competition. The multi-year competition will support companies developing compelling chicken and fish alternatives that replicate or outperform the real thing in terms of nutrition, environmental sustainability, animal welfare, and taste and texture. 

The competition, first announced at the end of 2020, is being conducted in partnership with ASPIRE, the project management arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). Grand-prize winners will not be chosen until 2024. when multiple winners will collectively receive $15 million.

For now, the 28 finalists chosen to continue the competition will have the next year to work with the competition, ASPIRE, and The Tony Robbins Foundation to develop the first iterations of their products. Up to 10 finalist teams will be chosen towards the end of 2022 and will split a “milestone award” of $2.5 million. 

Those 10 finalists will have one last round of competition where they will need to create “at least twenty-five cuts of structured chicken breast or fish fillet analogs of 115 gram or four ounce that replicate the sensory properties, versatility, and nutritional profile of conventional chicken or fish.” One grand prize winner will receive $7 million, with second- and third-place winners getting $2 million and $1 million, respectively.

The 28 finalists chosen this week represent all three pillars of alternative protein: plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation. Some of these companies are better known than others. Eat Just’s GOOD Meat, for example, is the only company in the world that has regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat (in Singapore). MeatOurFuture, on the other hand, is a public-private partnership that is known primarily in South Africa at this point. Others, including plant-based seafood company Brew51 from India, Japan’s IntegriCulture, and Air Protein, are all at various stages of development in terms of their products.

You can read the full list of companies, which span 14 different countries, here.

XPRIZE’s Feed the Next Billion competition was developed in response to the organization’s Future of Food Impact Roadmap, where the organization pinpointed 12 “breakthrough opportunities” that could help build a better food system. Alt-protein is a major area.

No one company developing alternative proteins has yet proven their technology and/or ingredients can feed the next billion. There remain many, many questions around the nutrition of products, the cost of making them, and, for some, whether or not they can ever really be produced at that scale. XPRIZE’s competition will no doubt go some ways towards answering those questions over the next few years.  

Eat Just’s GOOD Meat Raises $170M, Brings Its Cultivated Meat to More Restaurants

Eat Just announced today that its GOOD Meat division has raised $170 million in new funding. The round included UBS O’Connor, Graphene Ventures, K3 Ventures, and others, and officially makes GOOD a subsidiary of Eat Just.

The company said today it plans to use the new funds to increase capacity of GOOD’s cultured meat production in addition to furthering research and development. 

Eat Just became the world’s first company to receive regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in December of 2020 in Singapore. It quickly followed that up with the actual sale of GOOD meat at the 1880 restaurant in the city-state. Since then, 1880 customers have continued to order GOOD’s cultivated chicken product at the restaurant, and can now even get it for delivery via foodpanda.  

With the new funds, Eat Just will expand the availability of GOOD’s cultivated meat from that single restaurant to another, the JW Marriott Singapore South Beach’s Madame Fan. Notably, the JW Marriott location has said it will outright replace its conventional chicken with GOOD’s cultivated version at certain times of the day. To start, GOOD meat will replace conventional chicken for delivery items ordered on Thursdays, starting May 20. GOOD will be available “for once-a-week dine-in starting soon.”

Eat Just CEO and founder Josh Tetrick has said before that he sees a world in which “restaurants remove conventional meat from their menu[s].” Eat Just’s plant-based egg products have already fully replaced their traditional counterparts at some restaurant chains, and more restaurants around the world are now exploring alternative protein as a regular staple on the menu.

For cultivated meat, the march into restaurants won’t happen overnight. Eat Just remains the only company in the world that can currently sell cultivated meat, and Singapore is still the only place in which the company can do that. However, other countries and companies are already in the process of granting and getting regulatory approval, which means in the next year or so, we’ll see more restaurant menus around the world debuting cultivated meat products.