• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Skip to navigation
Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Events
  • Newsletter
  • Connect
    • Custom Events
    • Slack
    • RSS
    • Send us a Tip
  • Advertise
  • Consulting
  • About
The Spoon
  • Home
  • Podcasts
  • Newsletter
  • Events
  • Advertise
  • About

Integriculture

May 12, 2020

Over Sourdough? Your Next Quarantine Activity Could be Growing Meat

At this point we’re all over making sourdough, right? The needy sourdough starters, the shortages of flour… even for the fermentation-curious, it’s getting to be more trouble than it’s worth.

So for your next foodtech quarantine project, may I suggest growing your own meat?

If you don’t know where to start, Japanese company Integriculture has your back. Earlier this month the startup laid out the details of its new CulNet System; a technology that allows individuals and businesses to culture their own animal tissue.

Democratizing cultured meat has always been a goal for Integriculture founder Yuki Hanyu. In fact, Integriculture spun out of Shojinmeat, a DIY maker community focused on cultured meat founded in 2015. Interested hobbyists can already follow Shojinmeat’s guide — which is formatted to look like manga — to grow their own meat, right now.

The new CulNet system builds on Shojinmeat’s DIY framework to introduce a more sophisticated technology. It will allow everyone from restaurants to farmers to, yes, home hobbyists to grow their own animal tissue in larger quantities, with more precision.

Photo: Integriculture

Unlike Shojinmeat though, the CulNet System is not quite available yet. Integriculture is still in the R&D phase. It plans to begin licensing out the CulNet System — which includes hardware, animal starter cells, and media to feed cell growth — within the next two years or so. Until then, curious makers can still follow Shojinmeat’s guide to grow their own meat in a small scale.

Hanyu also mentioned at last year’s SKS Japan that the company was planning to release a product called Space Salt, essentially a dried version of cell culture media containing a blend of salt and amino acids, to help home enthusiasts grow their cells more easily. Hanyu said that they weren’t able to launch SpaceSalt last year because of difficulty sourcing ingredients from a factory that would give them a “legally food grade” mark. They’re still working to commercialize it.

The CulNet System is obviously geared to serious at-home makers who have the patience and motivation to tackle something like growing their own meat. But with meat processing plants closing and a meat shortage on the horizon, more and more people are taking a long, hard look at where our meat comes from.

This awareness could help accelerate consumer acceptance of new technologies like cultured meat — whether it’s made at home or by startups like Integriculture, Memphis Meats and Aleph Farms. For its part, Integriculture hosted a private taste test of their first product, cell-based foie gras, in 2019, and plans to start selling it commercially in 2021.

If growing your own animal tissue at home seems like too much work, you could always use this time to learn a new restaurant-worthy recipe, make good use of your smart kitchen gadgets, or even go all-out and develop a new connected appliance. Or just go back to yeast and make something besides sourdough.

August 30, 2019

Japanese Startup Integriculture Tests Foie Gras Grown in a Lab

Foie gras is one of the most contentious animal products out there. In order to get the goose liver so fatty, farmers have to force feed the animals — a practice that makes foie gras both ethically iffy and really expensive. Some cities are even considering banning it altogether.

However, Japanese cellular agriculture startup Integriculture is developing a cultured foie gras that can be made entirely without animals and therefore without the ethical hangups. This week, the company got one step closer to its goal when it did a private taste test of its cell-based liver at the Beyond Next Ventures office in Tokyo.

Integriculture has done previous tests of its product, but according to an email from Integriculture CEO Yuki Hanyu, this version was significantly more sophisticated. He noted that previous experiments were “chicken cell liver paste,” while this new product was “actual fat-loaded duck liver cells.” It apparently tasted much better and had a cleaner flavor than earlier versions. Hanyu said that they didn’t calculate the cost of producing the cultured foie gras.

The company is also finishing development on their SpaceSalt, a powdered version of cell media (the nutrient-rich bath in which cellular meat is grown) which they’ll sell to biohackers who want to grow their own meat at home using the guide from Shojinmeat, the DIY cultured meat community which Integriculture grew out of. in the aforementioned email, Hanyu told me he hopes to start selling the SpaceSalt by the end of this year.

Integriculture is on a tight timeline to perfect its cell-based foie gras and make it in large enough quantities to sell. The startup plans to launch the cultured liver in restaurants in 2021 and roll it out in Japanese retail in 2023, assuming the government approves cell-based meat for sale. That’s not a lot of time, but this latest test seems to show that the company is at least getting closer to perfecting the product.

August 9, 2019

Japanese Startup Integriculture Will Sell Cultured Foie Gras by 2021, and Teach You To Make It at Home

At SKS Japan this week, lots of speakers have been predicting what the future of food might look like: it might be cooked by robotic articulating arms, it might be carbon neutral, or it might be personalized to individuals’ specific tastes.

But the most futuristic vision of all might have come from Yuki Hanyu, CEO and founder of DIY cultured meat community Shojinmeat. He sketched out a time in which we’re all living on Mars, growing steak in bioreactors in much the same way we brew beer right now.

That reality is still a long way off. However, right now Hanyu is still working on quite a few projects pushing us towards a future in which everyone — yes, even you — can grow their own meat, and cultured meat is available in your corner supermarket.

Shojinmeat was the original enterprise, but in 2015 Hanyu spun out Integriculture, a startup creating full-stack cellular agriculture solutions. After his session at SKS Japan, Hanyu described his company’s projected timeline to me:

2019
By the end of this year Integriculture will start selling Space Salt, a dried version of cell culture media. For those who don’t nerd out on cellular agriculture, media is the liquid “food” that allows animal cells to rapidly proliferate to form meat. Space Salt is Integriculture’s (secret) proprietary blend of salt and food safe amino acids, which, when mixed with water, forms a DIY cell culture media. Hanyu wants to sell it to home enthusiasts who can use it to grow their own meat using Shojinmeat guide.

2020
While its focus is cultured meat, in 2020 Integriculture is also planning to sell its media for use in cosmetic applications, specifically as an anti-aging skincare product.

2021
In 2021, Integriculture will launch its first cell-based meat product: foie gras. Hanyu said that they decided to tackle foie gras as its first product because of its creamy texture, which means that they don’t have to emulate the texture and chew of meat. Since foie gras is already quite expensive, starting with that product will also presumably give consumers less of a sticker shock when they see its high price. Accordingly they plan to launch first in high-end restaurants in Japan.

“We’re not aiming for massive revenue at first,” Hanyu told me during SKS Japan. Instead, he’s expecting that the foie gras launch will be more of a proof of concept to show that cell-based meat is feasible and delicious. He also wants it to help establish regulatory guidelines for cultured animal products in Japan.

Which brings us back to the Space Salt. Presumably, when Integriculture starts selling its cell-based foie gras, Japanese food regulatory bodies will ask the company what’s in it in order to approve it for public consumption. At that time Hanyu and his team plan to show that the only two inputs are duck liver cells and Space Salt (plus water), the latter of which contains ingredients that are already sold on the market. He’s hoping that if they prove that duck liver and Space Salt are both already available for purchase, then by the transitive property their cell-based foie gras shouldn’t pose a problem.

If the 2021 restaurant launch goes as planned, Integriculture will start selling foie gras in supermarkets in 2023.

Photo: Integriculture

An ambitious timeline, to be sure — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The JST (Japan Science and Technology) Agency, part of the Japanese government, is investing part of its $20 million funding in Integriculture’s research for large-scale cell-based meat. The company is also working with JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) on its Space Food X program, which is developing closed-loop food solutions for space travelers.

That’s a lot of balls to juggle for the startup, especially one with only 13 employees and ¥300 million (USD 2.7 million) in funding. There’s also relatively little local support: despite the fact that cultured meat will likely debut in Asia, Japan is still quite light on cellular agriculture startups.

Interestingly, there’s at least one other company openly working in the cell-based meat space — and it’s a big one. Nissin Foods, the instant ramen giant, is partnering with the University of Tokyo to develop their own small cultured meat cubes to include in their freeze-dried ramen packs.

However, as they’re a large company which would require billions of tiny cell-based meat cubes — and they need to make them cheaply to keep down the cost of their product — Hanyu said that they’re likely 10 years away from actually incorporating cultured pork or chicken into the ramen packs.

Maybe then highbrow consumers will be able to have instant noodles with lab-grown foie gras.

April 16, 2018

Shojinmeat is Growing a DIY Clean Meat Community

In our video conference chat, Yuki Hanyu is almost matter of fact as he explains to me the steps involved when growing your own lab meat (or clean meat, whatever you want to call it) at home. It involves a fertilized chicken egg, dry ice, a centrifuge and an incubator. His English is a little broken, but his instructions are so clear I pause to wonder, “Well, why aren’t I growing lab meat in my kitchen?”

While the idea of cultivating lab-grown meat in your garage may sound like the beginnings of some 1980s B-movie, there are actually groups of people working on just such endeavors — and Hanyu is connecting them online with the Shojinmeat Project.

Hanyu, who has a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, started Shojinmeat in 2014 as part of his mission to democratize cell agriculture, including cell culture technology. Based out of Tokyo, Shojinmeat is now an active Slack channel that connects roughly 30 DIY citizen scientists from across Japan. They gather to talk about their homegrown meat experiments and related topics such as tissue engineering, animal welfare, and regenerative medicine. Shojinmeat has also put out ‘zines with articles and pictures about their work, and recently made a move to the West by creating an English-speaking Slack channel.

When you think of lab-grown meat, you probably think of–you know–a lab, with pristine white countertops, glass walls, and beakers gurgling. And if you know your way around lab meat, you may also know that the most common form of cell media is fetal bovine serum (FBS), which comes from slaughtered cow fetuses. You may wonder how everyday people would get their hands on such a thing, which is difficult to produce and therefore very expensive.

According to their presentation deck, Shojinmeat has done away with FBS altogether, using yeast extract as a cheaper, plant-based media, oftentimes supplemented with egg whites for necessary growth factors.

The homegrown meat process starts with a fertilized egg which, at least in Japan, is available at the local supermarket. Without getting too graphic, you incubate that egg for a dozen days, crack it open and extract your cells from the fetus inside.

Now those cells need to multiply. Historically, according to Hanyu, the biggest barrier to homegrown meat has been contamination. In order to multiply, meat cells need to be incubated at 38.5 degrees Celsius with 100 percent humidity — which happens to also be the perfect temperature for mold. Hanyu says that the egg whites make more common culture media mold-resistant.

Finally, to give the meat structure, Hanyu adds konjac, an East Asian plant, which the meat cells glom on to, adding depth. After incubating for a week to ten days, you will have a visible amount of meat growing!

Hanyu likens DIY lab meat enthusiasts to homebrewers, saying “They grow yeast cells, we grow meat.” While people in the Shojinmeat group have been successful growing meat, Hanyu didn’t mention anything about its taste during our chat.

But Hanyu is no mere enthusiast. In 2015 he spun out Integriculture, an ambitious startup that he hopes will create a “general purpose large-scale cell culture system.” He’s assembled a team of scientists and Hanyu says the company has already patented its core concept. But with Integriculture, Hanyu is thinking beyond meat (no pun intended), and even beyond our own planet.

In the short term, Integriculture won’t even make meat. Instead, it will use its cell growing technology to create customized products for cosmetics and supplements companies. Hanyu is vague on details, but says he’s been talking with potential customers who are interested in Integriculture’s general purpose cell growth capabilities across a wide array of applications.

Further out, the company plans to create a clean meat infrastructure that it could license out to other companies. Which means you probably won’t see Integriculture meat on the store shelves; instead, Integriculture’s process will be used to create meat that will be branded and sold by other companies.

Eventually, and this was where Hanyu’s straightforward demeanor gave way to something altogether more animated, Integriculture wants to create a clean meat facility that could be used on Mars. “We’re sci-fi freaks!” he said, beaming.

When asked what makes his company different from other players in the lab-meat space, such as Memphis Meat and SuperMeat, Hanyu says that Integriculture’s technology is more general purpose. In addition to meat, Integriculture has proven that it can grow foie gras (liver), and Hanyu says they can also grow other types of cells, such as pancreatic cells (though in our talk he did not mention any pharmaceutical applications).

Hanyu said that Integriculture is currently closing a ¥300,000,000 ($2.7 million USD) round of funding. While the company has space age dreams, cultured meat has the potential to make a big impact right here on Earth by providing a more eco-friendly and safer source of animal protein to the planet’s growing population.

Until lab meat becomes more mainstream, however, Shojinmeat will be growing its own culture of DIY enthusiasts who create their own meat at home. Will you be among them?

Previous

Primary Sidebar

Footer

  • About
  • Sponsor the Spoon
  • The Spoon Events
  • Spoon Plus

© 2016–2025 The Spoon. All rights reserved.

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
 

Loading Comments...