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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

lab-grown meat

Israel’s Profuse Technology Raises $2.5M for Technology That Lowers Cost of Cultured Meat

As the world awaits the arrival of cultured meat, manufacturers and their suppliers strategize to cope with the realities of this potentially mammoth market. Infrastructure and product scaling for growth remain a challenge from the supply side. Still, concerns over the pricing of lab-grown meat, poultry, and seafood might be the most significant roadblock to consumer acceptance.

Israeli-based Profuse Technology believes it has a solution to bring manufacturing costs down to a point where a pound of cultured beef could achieve price parity with meat from a live animal. A step forward, the company has announced the completion of a $2.5 million seed funding round (and a total of $3.75m since its establishment). The round is led by New York-based investment firm Green Circle and existing shareholders – OurCrowd, Tnuva, and Tempo. Other new investors include Siddhi Capital, a leader in investments in cultivated meat, and Kayma, the investment arm of De-Levie, a meat industry specialist.

According to the announcement, the company will use the funds to collaborate with cultivated meat producers, obtain FDA regulatory approval, and expand the research and development team and its laboratories. The funds will also position the company to source significant capital raising at the end of the second quarter of 2023 to commercialize its customer collaborations.

Profuse’s solution is based on what it calls “a cocktail” that is added during the period when a harvested animal stem cell begins its proliferation process. As founder and CTO Dr. Tamar Eigler-Hirsh told The Spoon: “You would start with a biopsy, and it could be directly from the muscle tissue or an embryonic stem cell harvested from an animal. The cultivated meat companies would take these cells, bank the most successful ones, and optimize them. They would grow them in bioreactors and expand and expand and proliferate these cells until they have hundreds of millions of cells per milliliter. And then, at some point, they have to differentiate the cells to become muscle tissue or muscle fibers. This is where our media supplement comes in.”

“What we’ve basically found a way was to target this natural biological mechanism of regeneration by understanding the biological pathway that that that’s responsible for that,” Dr. Eigler-Hirsh continues. “There’s one protocol to make muscle, and everybody follows it, and it’s very inefficient. Right now, we’re hearing numbers being reported about between 10% to 30% efficiency in converting stem cells into muscle. And using our technology, we can bump that number up from 30% well to over 90% efficiency in conversion of stem cell to muscle.”

Greater efficiency yields more muscle which in turn leads to cultured meat. The math is simple: a more significant and efficient supply can bring down manufacturing costs, which can be passed on to the consumer.

Profuse founder and CEO Guy Nevo Michrowski goes into further detail on the issue of price parity. . First, you won’t need as many cells to start with because your efficiency of using the cells will be 95%. So instead of going for 30 days, you’re going for only 25 days. And most important, the most expensive days are being saved. So, in the last ten days, where over 85% to 90% of the median cost is consumed, those days are cut by half because you don’t need as many cells. And then also, the differentiation and fusion maturation phase of creating them is now reduced to two days instead of ten. Your overall process is only 27 days versus 40 days, which means your factory can produce 33% more yearly.”

Using technology developed at the Weitzman Institute, the company started in 2021. In 2022 it began collaborating with cultivated meat companies and others who potentially would be our distribution partners. Michrowski said that Profuse is working with the major players in the cultured meat and poultry space” And I would say that of the ten leading companies worldwide, we are working with the vast majority together “to demonstrate and quantify the effects of our cocktail on their specific production environment. We operate with different customers to demonstrate our value in different viable development environments and methods.”

Vow Foods, Maker of Cell-Based Kangaroo and Other Meats, Raises $6M

Sydney, Australia-based company Vow Foods announced today that it has raised $6 million in seed funding to further develop alternative forms of meat — chicken, pork, and kangaroo among them. The round was led by Square Peg Capital, with participation from Tenacious Ventures and existing investors Blackbird Ventures and Grok Ventures, according to an email sent to The Spoon.

Investment in the cell-based meat sector has steadily increased over the last several months, though most of that funding has gone towards companies producing alt forms of the most common meats, including chicken, pork, beef, and bacon. 

Like other cell-based meat companies, Vow uses animal cells, rather than actual animals, to produce alternative meat products. In cultivators, it nourishes the animal cells, which then form fat, tissue, and muscle just as they would if they were growing inside the animal itself. 

Unlike others in the space, Vow hasn’t limited itself to just the basics when it comes to meat types. As of this writing, the company has a cell library of 11 different animals that includes more exotic fare such as alpaca, water buffalo, and the aforementioned kangaroo. 

The company did a taste testing of its kangaroo dumpling in 2019. More recently, it held a “culinary demonstration” event that showed off six of its cell-based meat products. The company will also soon open a “food design studio” and laboratory in Sydney to further develop its products. 

And while eating a lab-grown kangaroo might still seem like the stuff of fantasy for many, cell-based meat as a legitimate player in the food industry is very much a reality now. As mentioned above, investment dollars for cell-based meat increased in 2020, and new companies and approaches emerged steadily throughout the year. To cap it all off, cell-based meat got its first-ever regulatory stamp of approval in Singapore, thereby opening the gates of opportunity for others.

Parts of the world — the U.S. being one of them — will probably never see cell-based kangaroo on grocery store shelves. However, Vow’s fundraise this week highlights not just further growth for the cell-based meat sector, but also an interest in the kind of variety and versatility the whole industry needs to continue its march into the mainstream food system.

Human Steak: the Next Lab-Grown Meat?

The range of alternative meats grown in a lab widens every month, and now we have companies attempting lab-grown beef, chicken, seafood, brisket, and even kangaroo. Could human meat be next?

I doubt it, but a group of designers recently highlighted how possible that concept would be should someone attempt to try it. Andrew Pelling, Orkan Telhan and Grace Knight made a DIY meal kit for lab-grown human meat that was recently nominated for Design of the Year by The Design Museum in London.

Called the Ouroboros Steak (named after the ancient symbol of the snake eating its own tail), the design is for a meal kit that would come with everything a person needs to culture cells from their own body and turn them into mini steaks. The design was commissioned for the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Designs for Different Futures exhibition, which ended in March of this year. 

To be clear: no one is growing human meat to sell in the grocery stores. The design is purely conceptual. According to Design Museum, it is “a critical commentary on the lab-grown meat industry and critiques the industry’s claims to sustainability.”

That critique is right on the mark, since lab-grown meat producers generally rely on the controversial Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS) to produce their alt-meat wares. FBS is a byproduct that comes from the blood of cow fetuses. As this article from Slate from a few years back highlights, it’s a gruesome practice that involves killing a pregnant cow, removing the live fetus, then draining the latter of blood that eventually gets refined and turned into FBS. 

The website for the Ouroboros Steak concept doesn’t specifically mention FBS, but notes, almost wryly, that, “Growing yourself ensures that you and your loved ones always know the origin of your food, how it has been raised and that its cells were acquired ethically and consensually.”

To be fair, a number of lab-grown meat companies acknowledge the ethics around FBS, and some are taking steps to find a different media for their products. When I spoke with BioBQ last month, CEO Katie Kam emphasized that her company does not use FBS and is instead looking for an alternative media for its lab-grown brisket. In Canada, a company called Future Fields is in the midst of developing what it calls “animal-free media,” which is just as it sounds.

Still, the FBS is the go-to media when it comes to cell-based meat, and calling out the ethics of it was a major goal of the Ouroboros Steak design: “As the lab-grown meat industry is developing rapidly, it is important to develop designs that expose some of its underlying constraints in order to see beyond the hype,” Pelling told Dezeen magazine.

He added that, “We are not promoting ‘eating ourselves’ as a realistic solution that will fix humans’ protein needs. We rather ask a question: what would be the sacrifices we need to make to be able to keep consuming meat at the pace that we are?”

Lab-grown meat is in the midst of an investment frenzy, not to mention the subject of much hype and news coverage. But it won’t be landing on grocery store shelves any time soon, in part because, in addition to being controversial, FBS is extremely expensive. A number of regulatory issues and questions around scalability also need to be resolved before we’re eating a cell-based Big Mac or nabbing a couple fillets for the backyard BBQ. Opinions differ around lab-grown meat’s timeline to the mainstream, with some claiming it will take just a couple years and others putting that mark “somewhere north of 15.” Some say it will never happen.

Wherever the reality falls, lab-grown meat producers will have to address the controversies surrounding their process process. That could mean explaining to consumers the gory details of FBS or, better yet, finding an alternative. Human meat won’t ever be that alternative, but the Ouroboros Steak project rightly reminds us we need to think twice about the ethics of innovation before barelling headlong into the hype.

Meat-Tech 3D Closes $7M Funding Round, Files for IPO

Israeli food tech company Meat-Tech 3D officially announced yesterday that it had closed a $7 million funding round for its cultured meat production technologies that integrate 3D printing. The round was led by Psagot Provident and Pension Funds with participation from the Mor investment house as well as private investors.

The funding announcement comes about one week after Meat-Tech 3D said it had started the process for an IPO in the U.S. (The company is traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange already.)

At this point, Meat-Tech 3D is more focused on the B2B realm, with plans to license its technology — a combination of cell-cultured meat processing and 3D printing — to alt-meat producers, rather than creating its own line of products. 

That technology and process involves growing cells in bioreactors then turning the different cell types (e.g., muscle, fat) into inks that get bioprinted to mimic a specific cut of meat. The 3D-printed structures are then placed in incubators where they grow before being frozen and packaged for shipping. The company successfully printed a piece of beef via this method.

Scale, however, is what Meat-Tech 3D ultimately wants to achieve. And as we’ve discussed before, there’s a long trek towards cultured meat at scale, and a big difference between a successful prototype and having an actual product widely available.

Meat-Tech isn’t the only cell-based meat company using 3D printing. At the recent Smart Kitchen Summit, NovaMeat showed off it’s 3D printer by making a “steak” live during the show. And earlier this year, Redefine Meat said it had achieved the ability to 3D print plant-based steaks using industrial-level technology.

Meat-Tech CEO Sharon Fima said in today’s press release that the new funds will enable the company to progress with its acquisition of cultured meat company Peace of Meat as well as continuing to build out R&D.

The company has not yet provided a timeframe for the IPO. 

The Food Tech Show: Lab-Grown Meat vs. The Internet

Happy Friday!

Heading out early for the final weekend before election day? Listen to The Food Tech Show podcast on your way!

In this week’s editor roundtable episode of The Food Tech Show, we talk about whether lab-grown meat can scale like the Internet, Ordermark’s massive new funding round earmarked to help them build out their ghost kitchen and virtual restaurant strategy, Coca Cola’s acquisition of a coffee robot startup, and whether or not the term “veggie burger” has a future in Europe.

As always, you can find The Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just play directly below.

Lab-Grown Meat is Scaling Like the Internet

This guest post originally appeared on Medium, and has been reprinted here with permission.

It’s easy to think that there’s hype in lab-grown meat. Just another Silicon Valley utopian tech. The idea of growing meat without animals is everywhere and very distant at the same time. Now a global trend, 80 startups work on lab-grown meat worldwide in one way or another… Four years ago there were two. Consumer interest is also evolving rapidly — the #plantbased market is growing quickly, soon it will be 10% of the meat market. Lab-grown meat has been thoroughly covered in the news, on magazine covers and in books.

Let’s take a look at decoding some questions from the news and announcements. As novelty or mainstream product, when will this meat come to market? Will it ever reach its promise of selling as cheaply as other meat in the deli case?

Look at the forces driving Cellular Agriculture (cellAg) and we will see that lab-grown meat will be a part of everyday life in a surprisingly short time.

Last fall I plotted some of the lab-grown meat stories onto a pricing plot since the dawn of time (2013):

The red dots are pricing statements and estimates for a serving of lab-grown meat through last summer. The slope shows a price drop that is faster than some of the most powerful technologies that we have seen.

The blue line is the famed Moore’s Law , the cost of a transistor over a period of 12 years, — the classic impactful technology. Moore’s Law unleashed infoTech and the internet, e-commerce, facial recognition, smart phones, Amazon, Netflix, targeted advertising, the efficient and global dissemination of cat pictures.

The Green line is the cost of sequencing a human genome over the same period of time, compiled by the National Institutes of Health. The first human genome sequence was perhaps $300M. Last year I bought my own 20x covered genome sequence for $800 (it was on holiday special). Billions are being spent on mobilizing sequencing for personal healthcare, monitoring the environment, testing food safety and detecting COVID-19. Although not a consumer product by and large, sequencing is so cheap as to be just under the surface of our daily lives.

This curve is why Memphis Meats was an easy investment for me four years ago and why investors often jump in since. There is sixty-five years of cell culture research by a few million researchers worldwide as well as a global network of manufacturing experience all ready to jump in. Cell Science has spring loaded lab-grown meat. Overall, most biotech products have economics that start slow for each product but drop by log pricing over time. This is a fundamental upon which analysts at McKinsey have dubbed The Bio Revolution.

The slope of the pricing curve is steeper than transistors: cost has dropped 6000 times since Mark Post’s burger reveal 7 years ago. The red line fitting lab-grown meat cost crosses the $50/serving mark in 2021. This curve is not scientific and each company has its own internal pricing curve; the cost may already have dropped below $50/serving in some companies.

This year, just on time, a flurry announcements of product releases have come out. The biggest fans will be able to go out and buy lab-grown meat:

This first round of product releases wont be replacing the deli cut chicken breast and hot dogs in your grocery. Impossible Burgers were made with a simpler process but the first release in a few restaurants and were said to cost the company $100 a patty. These product releases will not be profitable, but today a pound pack of Impossible Burger costs $9.99 at Safeway. At the current rate of innovation, the next future of meat could be here in the next few years.

The Impossible Burger has had a cost drop of several hundred fold at least since its prototype days.

Moore’s Law is not a law. Each step along the curve will require new insights and new discovery. Like Moore’s Law, the “Shigeta’s Law” price of lab-grown meat will hit a physical law — how fast or how many times a cell can divide — how small a space can they grow in? How quickly can manufacturing and infrastructure be built out? How pure does the sugar in the media have to be to grow the cells? We aren’t there yet and the next innovations will be about manufacturing at very high scale and some of the unplumbed depths of cell biology.

To date, a lot of the drop has been in reagents and simple scaling tech. Today most meat is grown without Fetal Bovine Serum, but still relies on growth factors which are isolated from fermentation. Mosa Meats recently announced drastically lowering the cost of FBS free media. Other efforts around the globe will have to pursue scaling manufacturing and processing the cells.

And what about the hype? Not all of these companies will be around to see the public take their first bite of cellAg Burger. The Clean Meat startup explosion is a lot like the emergence of car companies. In 1900 the first American combustion engine automobile companies appeared. By 1910 the count had exploded to 266. Most of the companies were merged or died off until 3 companies dominated the market by the 1960s.

There was little first mover advantage: Ford was an early entrant (1903), General Motors (1908), and Chrysler was decades past the startup peak. (1928).

So yes there is hype — the same sort of hype that the automobile created. Small companies claiming too much and flaming out. But make no mistake, Animal Free, lab-grown, Cultured Meat is coming sooner than you think.

Higher Steaks Creates World’s First Lab-Grown Bacon and Pork Belly

United Kingdom based startup Higher Steaks claimed in an announcement today they have successfully created the world’s first lab-grown prototypes for bacon and pork belly.

(Editor update: Mission Barns CEO Eitan Fischer reached out to The Spoon to claim they had created a cultivated bacon prototype this past May, but did not announce it widely at the time).

The production of the first cultivated bacon is big news for those excited for alternatives to industrially produced meat. While 2020 has been a big year for alt-pork, with Impossible launching their plant-based pork at CES and Omnipork debuting their plant-based pork shoulder, this news from Higher Steaks marks the first time bacon or pork belly have been developed from actual animal cells.

The interest in alt-pork shouldn’t be surprising since meat from pigs is the most consumed type of meat in the world. However, countries like China have seen huge viral threats to their pig population, with around half being wiped out in 2019 due to African Swine Fever.

According to company CEO Benjamina Bollag, the protoypes took approximately one month to create, developed from a type of a highly adaptable type of stem cell called induced pluripotent stem cells.

“In nature, you have adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells,” Bollag told The Spoon in an interview. “And this is a way of taking any cell in the body and bringing it back to the embryonic state. Which means that you can expand those cells a lot more and you can make any type of tissue.”

Higher Steaks lab-grown pork belly

According to Bollag, the company used stem cells to create muscle tissue, and used a combination of plant protein and fats to round out the prototype. In the future, Bollag says the company intends to use stem cells to create the other parts of the bacon.

For Higher Steaks, creating the world’s first lab-grown bacon prototype is a big accomplishment. Dutch startup Meatable raised $10 million late last year as part of their effort to create a lab-grown pork, while New Age Meats debuted a lab-grown pork sausage prototype in 2018.

If you’re excited to try out cultivated bacon, you may have to wait a few years. According to Bollag, lab-grown bacon and pork belly will take a while to get to market.

“So I think in the next two to three years, you’ll start seeing it in the upper end, maybe in select restaurants, small quantities” said Bollag. “I think for it to be mass market, really price comparison and supermarket, you’re looking more around five years.”

You can see my full interview with Bollag talking about the development of their bacon and pork belly prototypes below.

Avant Meats Has First Public Taste Test of Cultured Fish Maw in Hong Kong

For many Western consumers, “fish maw” is an unfamiliar foodstuff. However, in China and other surrounding regions, the ingredient, which is technically the dried swim bladders of large fish like sturgeon, is considered a delicacy. For that reason, it’s both extremely expensive and leading to extreme overfishing. There’s even a black market for the stuff.

In Hong Kong, startup Avant Meats is finding a more sustainable way to feed hunger for fish maw by growing it outside the animal. The company got one step closer to that goal last month, when they did the first public taste test of their cultured fish maw at the Future Food Summit at Asia Society Hong Kong.

The fish maw, grown from cells from a croaker fish, was embedded in a potato ball which was then deep-fried. Obviously we didn’t get to taste it ourselves (sadly), but in a video sent to The Spoon taste testers noted the ball’s chewy, gelatinous texture, a hallmark of fish maw. Texture is one of the biggest hurdles for cell-based meat, so if Avant Meats has indeed nailed it that could serve them well as they head to market.

When I spoke with Avant Meats co-founder and CEO Carrie Chan back in March, she explained that they had decided to focus on fish maw as their first product because of it’s simple composition, which allows them to speed up R&D, scale quickly, and come to market at a lower price point. Another reason they chose to focus on fish maw is because of its popularity with consumers in China and Hong Kong, their initial target demographic. However, according to a press release sent to The Spoon, their next product will be a fish filet that is intended for both Eastern and Western menus.

This year has been a busy one for cultured meat companies in Asia. Back in March Shiok Meat debuted its cell-based shrimp in the startup’s home country of Singapore, and Japan-based Integriculture recently did a taste test of cultured foie gras.

American companies like Memphis Meats, JUST, and Wild Type have also done several tastings of their own cell-based products, some on significantly larger scales. However, since cell-based (cultivated?) meat will likely debut in Asia, it’s exciting to see the increase in cultured meat and seafood activity in the area — especially for products developed specifically to appeal to Asian palates.

Avant Meats has raised an undisclosed pre-seed round and has a team of five in its Hong Kong HQ. They’re hoping to reach pilot production by late 2022/early 2023.

Aleph Farms Says it Has Grown Meat Cells in Space

Israeli lab-grown food company Aleph Farms on Monday claimed a world’s, or rather, a galaxy’s first, announcing that it has successfully grown small-scale muscle tissue on the International Space Station, which the company points out is “248 miles away from any natural resources.”

Aleph Farms says it uses the natural process of muscle-tissue regeneration in a lab setting to grow its steaks. The Sept. 26 experiment was conducted in the Russian segment of the ISS, using a 3D bioprinter developed by Russia’s 3D Bioprinting Solutions. The U.S.’s Meal Source Technologies and Finless Foods also collaborated on the experiment.

Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka conducting the experiment on the ISS. (Courtesy Aleph Farms)

Not only does the experiment prove that astronauts may one day grow their own steaks, the company says, but it shows that Aleph’s technology could be used anywhere on Earth, despite access to water and other resources. Growing cows for slaughter is one of the most resource-heavy food production processes for the planet, which is why many startups are seeking to replace beef, whether through cultivated or plant-based meat.

“In space, we don’t have 10,000 or 15,000 liters of water available to produce one kilogram of beef,” Didier Toubia, co-founder and CEO of Aleph Farms, said in the press release. “This joint experiment marks a significant first step toward achieving our vision to ensure food security for generations to come, while preserving our natural resources.”

While Aleph had Earth’s climate crisis in mind when conducting this experiment, 30 Japanese companies launched a consortium this year to figure out how to feed people in space. But hopefully, all of the solutions currently in the works will mean we won’t have to flee to another planet for survival.

New Coalition Forms to Bring Cultured Meat to Market Faster

Today five cellular agriculture and aquaculture companies announced that they have formed a new coalition to educate and advocate for cultured meat — that is, meat or seafood grown outside the animal.

Called the Alliance for Meat, Poultry and Seafood Innovation (AMPS Innovation), the group consists of cellular aquaculture companies BlueNalu and Finless Foods and cell-based meat companies Fork & Goode, JUST, and Memphis Meats.

The goal of the coalition is to twofold. They want to provide resources to educate consumers on what exactly cell-based meat is and its health and environmental footprint. But to get to that, they’ll first have to tackle their other goal: to get cell-based meat and fish approved by regulators.

According to a press release sent to the Spoon:

In the coming months, AMPS Innovation intends to engage policymakers and stakeholders to educate them on their products in addition to working with Congress, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration as they continue to build out a regulatory framework for meat, poultry and seafood that is grown directly from animal cells, rather than harvested from the animals themselves.

Basically, AMPS Innovation will act as a mouthpiece and knowledge expert for the larger cellular agriculture industry, pushing for regulatory acceptance needed to bring cultured meat to market.

As of now, the regulatory pathway for cell-based animal products is still pretty nebulous. Last year the FDA and USDA agreed that they would jointly regulate cultured meat; the FDA will oversee animal cell collection and initial cell growth, while the USDA will be in charge of large-scale production labeling. It’s still unclear at exactly what point in the process that handoff will take place, and there’s no timeline about when the governmental bodies will actually approve cultured meat for sale.

Cell-based meat will make it to market; with the amount of interest around and capital invested in cell ag companies, that seems inevitable. At that point AMPS Innovation will likely pivot to focus more on educating consumers who are wary of eating meat grown in a lab — and pushing back against big meat and farming coalitions that don’t want them edging in on their sales.

AMPS Innovation is already building its case. In addition to resources such as high-res media images and descriptions about the cell-based meat production process, their website also has a page called “Terms that are accurate” (kind of an aggressive way to label a glossary, IMHO). The page states that terms like “Meat / poultry / seafood” or “meat / poultry / seafood products” are applicable to cell-based meat, poultry, and seafood, since they are made from animals and real animal flesh.

Big Meat is not going to like that. Farming groups and large meat corporations are already aggressively pushing for labeling restrictions for both plant-based and cell-based meat, even though the latter has yet to make it to market. AMPS Innovation clearly understands to gain regulatory approval, they’ll have to fight not only skeptical regulatory bodies, but also traditional animal agriculture companies with boatloads of money and governmental support.

The timing is right for AMPS Innovation. As the list of companies making cell-based meat and seafood grows, their messaging is becoming more fragmented. They need a unified voice with which to answer questions and advocate for their cause — both now as they start gearing up to advocate for regulatory acceptance, and later as they try to win over consumers.

Aleph Farms Raises $12M for its Slaughter-Free Steak

Though plant-based meat has grabbed most of the headlines in alternative protein this year, thanks to Beyond Meat going public and Impossible Foods scaling up, lab-grown or cultured meat is having a banner year of its own. Case in point: Aleph Farms announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series A round of funding led by VisVires New Protein, with Cargill Protein and M-Industry participating as well.

Israel-based Aleph Farms is looking to make full-on steaks, complete with the same structure and texture as traditional meat. As my colleague, Catherine Lamb wrote last year:

To do that, [Aleph’s] scientists are working on growing four types of cells: muscle, fat, blood vessels, and connective tissue. While those last two might not sound very appetizing, Toubia said that they’re critical to replicating the texture of meat. Once they cultivate the various types of cells, they place them on scaffolds which act as a framework for the cells to cling onto. That way, the four types of cells can grow together into a finished product with the shape of steak — not just blobs of separate cell types in petri dishes that have to be manually combined.

Last December, Aleph unveiled what it called the first lab-grown minute steak: a steak made from cow cells in a bioreactor. Though the steak was only a few inches long and a few centimeters thick, The Wall Street Journal tried one, noting that it “passes” for the real thing. Aleph’s new money will go towards accelerating the development of this earlier prototype into a commercial product.

It should be noted that this is the second slaughter-free meat investment for Cargill, the U.S.’ third-largest meat producer. Cargill, along with chicken giant, Tyson, has also put money into Memphis Meats. Both companies are angling to be their own disruptor, rather than leaving that to some upstart startup.

The investment comes at a time when consumers are reconsidering the ethical and environmental impact of eating traditional meat. While sales of plant-burgers are booming right now, we are still a ways away from lab-grown meat reaching our dinner plates. Memphis Meats and Mosa Meat claim they’ll have their cultured meat to market by 2021, and JUST has said it will debut its cultured meat in Asia by the end of this year.

Before slaughter-free meat does hit the market, it will have to tackle its own set of hurdles like how it will be labeled and regulated. Most of all, however, these cultured meat companies will need to scale production to hit the mass market at a price point consumers can afford. Because unlike meat, money can’t be grown in a lab.

For Cultured Meat, Scaffolding is the Next Big Hurdle. Could LEGOs Hold the Answer?

As of now, cultured meat comes out looking one way: like mush. That’s because scientists have figured out ways to replicate animal muscle, fat, and tissue cells, but not how to make them grow to make fibers. In short, we can grow a hamburger, but not something like a steak, which requires a more solid physical form.

But scientists are working to change this, developing scaffolding technology to help those muscle cells grow in formations that would mimic the chew of pork chops, chicken strips, and, of course, steak.

Most recently — and most exciting to my inner five-year-old — is the LEGO method. Researchers from Penn State have developed a new technique to spin cornstarch fibers into an edible scaffold using LEGO pieces. The scaffold could then, at least theoretically, be used to grow cultured meat.

According to Dr. Gregory Ziegler, a food science professor at Penn State who’s been working on the project, to make the scaffold they use a technique called “electrospinning,” where scientists apply electricity to an edible starch solution as it dispenses from a nozzle, creating long threads that adhere to a LEGO “mat”. Ziegler told me that they chose to use LEGO pieces because they’re cheap and also plastic, so they don’t conduct electricity.

They’ve been developing the technique for five years but only recently figured out how to align the aforementioned threads to make longer fibers. Now they’re starting to look into applications for the technology — including lab-grown meat.

They haven’t actually tried growing any sort of meat on these electrospun scaffolds. Yet. Ziegler said the next step is to get more funding so they can try and efficiently scale scaffolding production to lower the cost of the technology. Eventually Ziegler plans that scaffolds will be made with some material other than LEGOs (sorry). They then want to execute some tests to see if the scaffolds are indeed as useful for cultured meat as Ziegler predicts they will be.

Photo: Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Ziegler’s method might be eye-catching, but he’s far from the only one trying to develop scaffolds for cell-based meat. In fact, scientists are experimenting with all manner of materials to try and make an edible ground for cellular agriculture.

One popular material is plants. By emptying plants of all their living material and leaving a sort of husk of cell walls, scientists can use their structure as a natural (and edible) blueprint for animal tissue. Worcester Polytechnic Institute is experimenting with spinach leaves as a scaffold for tissue growth (see above), and others are trying jackfruit and artichokes.

Fungi are also a natural fit. Startup Ecovative has developed a foam-like substance made out of mycelium, or delicate mushroom roots. Ecovative’s mushroom scaffolds can be grown in only 9 days and are tender enough to eat. They won’t dissolve, however, which could affect the overall flavor and texture of the end product.

Still, scaffolding isn’t the only way to create texture with cultured meat. Some companies are looking into 3D printing as a method to form “steaks” and more with animal tissue cells.

Of course, this technology is kind of moot until cell-based meat companies figure out how to clear those pesky regulatory hurdles and finally get the stuff to market. But as cultured meat becomes more widely available, and more affordable, consumer acceptance is going to play a larger and larger role. And it’ll be a lot easier to get the hardcore carnivores on board if they can try a cell-based steak that actually tastes — and chews — like the real thing.