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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Matrix Meats

Eric Jenkusky of Matrix Meats Calls for Transparency in the Cultivated Meat Space

In September, the USDA opened a public comment period to solicit input about the labeling of cultivated meat products. The move was widely seen as an important step forward in the regulatory approval process for the commercial sale of cultivated meat products in the United States, which many anticipate will happen soon.

When cultivated meat finally does make it to market, it’s important that consumers know exactly what’s in the product, at least according to Eric Jenkusky. Jenkusky is the CEO of Matrix Meats, a company that makes plant-based scaffolding for alternative protein and cultivated meat products. I caught up with Jenkusky last week to talk about the cultivated meat market, the regulatory approval process, and the role he saw his company playing in all of it.

In the past year, Matrix has had contact with 50 plus companies in the cultivated meat industry, and is currently engaged with 22. It is also now offering companies a wet lab research contract, where it will assist interested cultivated meat companies with the feeding and scaffold protocols.

After a busy 2021, next year will be even busier for Matrix; according to Jenkusky, “We are looking at assisting a few companies in achieving a product, a cultivated food product with at least 50 percent cultivated cells in the paid product by quarter two of 2022.”

When cultivated meat products are unveiled by various companies, Jenkusky said an important question is never asked, “How much of this product is cultivated cells, and what type of cultivated cells are those?” For the sake of the industry’s reputation and the consumers who care about what they’re eating, transparency will be crucial. We are often shown photos are videos of different whole cuts of cultivated meat products, but the composition of these products is rarely disclosed.

As Matrix Meats works with companies to achieve a cultivated meat product, Jenkusky said, “One of the things that we plan on doing is when our product comes, is we’re going to be completely transparent to the world as to what and who we’re working with.” Although the USDA and FDA will be regulating the labeling and overseeing the production of cultivated meat products, it is currently unclear what level of transparency they will demand of these products.

About 40 percent of surveyed consumers expressed that they were afraid of lab-produced products such as cultivated meat. Fear like this often stems from not knowing or understanding what a product is made of and how it was produced. In the plant-based space, alternative meat sales may be dropping to the lack of ingredient transparency. For consumers to adopt cultivated meat, it will be critical to disclose ingredients, cell composition, and the production process.

These Four Startups Are Growing Animal-free Scaffolds for Cell-Cultured Meat

It’s one thing to grow an amorphous blob of muscle or fat cells in a bioreactor—and another thing to recreate the structure of animal tissue. In order to make a complex product like a steak or a salmon fillet, cell-cultured meat producers need to provide their stem cells with a scaffold to grow on.

In nature, growing stem cells are housed within a structure of proteins and polysaccharides called the extracellular matrix. The cells’ interaction with this environment guides the way that they adhere, differentiate, and migrate.

Both cell-based meat manufacturers and business-to-business suppliers in the industry are experimenting with different scaffolding materials that can mimic the extracellular matrix. Below, we’ll discuss some scaffolding solutions and the startups that are exploring them.

You might notice that all of the materials we mention are animal-free—a significant development as alternative meat companies seek to reduce their dependence on animal inputs.


1. DaNAgreen is developing extracellular matrix stand-ins for both clinical and food applications. On its website, the South Korean startup describes Protinet™-P, its scaffolding product for cell-cultured meat manufacturing, as “a food that incubates food.” Protinet™-P scaffolds are completely edible, as they’re made from isolated plant proteins.

DanNAgreen currently offers its products in custom sizes and shapes. The company plans to spend the next few years scaling up production.

2. Seawith, a cell-cultured meat company also based in South Korea, is using algae-based scaffolds to grow its products. Along with being nutrient-rich, algae is relatively easy and inexpensive to grow. In The Spoon’s recent interview with Seawith, we learned that the company credits its algae scaffolding with the development of thicker cell-based steaks.

The company hopes to start selling its cell-cultured meat products to restaurants by 2023, though the team is awaiting regulatory decisions from the South Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety.

3. Excell is exploring the use of fungal mycelium as a scaffolding substrate. Mycelium contains the polymer chitin, which can be made to mimic some of the polysaccharides found in the natural extracellular matrix. Some fungi also have a meaty taste and texture, so it’s possible that mycelium-based substrates could enhance the sensory experience of eating cell-cultured meat.

Excell is currently offering mycelium scaffolding culture kits to researchers and product developers, and collecting feedback on how its products perform.

4. Matrix Meats of Ohio is approaching the challenge in a different way. The company uses an electrospinning technique to build nanofiber scaffolds. As FoodNavigator has reported, Matrix’s scaffolds can be made of a combination of different materials, which could allow cell-based meat producers to grow cultured muscles and fats together on a single structure.

Matrix works directly with cell-cultured meat startups to develop custom scaffolding solutions for their products. Client companies can control the scaffolding material, fiber size, and other factors.

These innovations with plant and fungi-based scaffolds could just be the start. Animal-derived collagen has been widely studied as a cellular scaffold material (which makes sense, as collagen is one of the proteins found in the natural extracellular matrix)—and it may be possible to make animal collagen scaffolds without using actual animals. Researchers have managed to produce animal collagen using gene-edited tobacco plants, and recombinant collagen produced by bacteria and yeast also look promising.

Advancements in animal-free scaffolding should help cell-cultured meat producers to cut costs and reduce their environmental impacts. (And this isn’t just a hypothetical: With its algae scaffold, DaNAgreen has been able to produce cell-based steaks at near price-parity with conventional products.) We’re likely to see much more innovation in the field as cell-cultured companies explore hybrid production options.

Matrix Meats, Maker of Alt-Meat Scaffolding Tech, Raises Seed Funding

Matrix Meats, a Columbus, Ohio-based maker of proprietary technology for scaffolding used in the creation of cultured meat, has raised a seed funding round according a press release sent to The Spoon.

The round, the amount of which was not disclosed, was led by Unovis Asset Management and, according to the press release, “further supported by CPT Capital, Siddhi Capital, Clear Current Capital and a special purpose vehicle (SPV) led by the Ikove Startup Nursery Fund.”

Ikove’s participation makes sense, as Matrix was born out of a partnership between Ikove Startup Nursery and Nanofiber Solutions. Nanofiber Solutions is the company which created the original process – called electrospinning – which Matrix Meats uses for its scaffolding tech.

Scaffolding, a critical building block in the creation of cultured meat, is used by cultured meat makers in bioreactors to provide a structure around which cells can replicate as they grow. Scaffolding can be made of synthetic or natural materials like plant-based or collagen. Matrix’s electrospinning technology is flexible and can use a variety of materials.

Here’s how Matrix CTO Jed Johnson described the company’s business back in an interview with the Spoon in the summer:

“It’s like the SaaS model, but instead of software as a service, it’s scaffold as a service,” said Johnson, “And we do that because we’re trying to design custom proprietary scaffold for each partner or each customer. Rather than take something off the shelf, like a cytodex bead, which is a standard microcarrier plastic bead that the pharmaceutical world uses, we’re developing custom scaffolds for for each of our partners. That’s because everyone in the culture meatspace is trying to carve out their sort of niche.”

According to the announcement, Matrix is currently working with 14 cultivated meat makers from seven different countries.

“We believe that our technology is an integral part of allowing the cultivated meat market to mature,” said Matrix Meats CEO Eric Jenkusky in the release. “Our innovative and programmable electro-spun nano-fiber scaffolds which replicate the extra cellular matrix of living organisms is backed by 50 awarded and pending patents. We will be expanding our efforts to assist our client/partners with accelerating their path to market.”