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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Memphis Meats

Memphis Meats Re-Brands as UPSIDE Foods, Announces Cultured Chicken as its First Product

Memphis Meats, one of the older cell-based protein startups, announced today that it has rebranded and is now UPSIDE Foods. Perhaps more important, the company also announced that its first consumer product, cultured chicken, will be available to customers this year… pending regulatory approval.

Founded in 2015, UPSIDE Foods cultivates animal protein without the need to raise animals. The company is working on cell-based versions of different kinds of meat, but said in today’s press announcement that it chose chicken as its first product because of its versatility in recipes and culinary applications, as well as its appeal across geographic regions.

To make its cell-basd meat at scale, UPSIDE has broken ground on a production facility in the San Francisco Bay Area. The full-stack facility will produce, package and ship cultured meat at what the company says is a larger capacity than any other cell-based meat company.

Back in 2019, UPSIDE told The Spoon that the company was holding off on establishing a concrete launch date for their cultivated meat until they could guarantee their product was tasty and scalable, and until regulatory frameworks were established. This last bit was echoed in today’s press release with the “pending regulatory approval” caveat. So far, Singapore is the only country that has approved the sale of cultured meat. There hasn’t been as much clarity here in the U.S., though execs at cultured meat startups are hopeful approvals will be granted in the next two years.

We are definitely entering into a new phase in the evolution of cultured meat. A number of cell-based startups around the world have received funding this year, including CellulaRevolution, CellMeat, Mirai Foods and New Age Meats. In addition to more funding, UPSIDE and other established cultured protein startups like BlueNalu and Avant Meats are opening up their own production facilities to scale up the manufacturing of their meat.

It’s also worth noting that UPSIDE’s chicken announcement comes during the same week that Future Meat said it has dropped the production price of its cell-based chicken by 50 percent. In an interview with Plant Based News, Future Meat CEO, Rom Kshuk said it now costs $4 to produce 110 grams of its chicken, and that price should drop to $2 over the next year and a half. Reaching price parity with conventional animal meat will be a key factor in the success of cultured meat.

Along with a new identity, UPSIDE also announced a new investor today. Whole Foods CEO, John Mackey, has invested an undisclosed sum in UPSIDE.

UPSIDE’s new name and look also reflects the company moving into its own next phase as it advances beyond research and into commercial production. If you’re interested in seeing how it all began with the company, I recommend watching the documentary Meat the Future, which chronicles the rise of Memphis Meats from its very early days through much of its growth.

Meat The Future (2020) I Official Trailer I MetFilm Sales

Europe? The U.S.? Israel? Which Country Might Be Next to Approve Cultured Meat

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Ever since Eat Just nabbed the world’s first regulatory approval to sell cultured meat in Singapore (and followed that milestone up by actually selling it), myself and many others have wondered which market will be next. 

The question was asked again this week when an article from Food Navigator zeroed in on Europe, noting, “Europeans want to know when it will be their turn: when will cultivated meat be served on EU plates?” It seems the most probable answer is three to five years. 

With Singapore already selling cultured meat at restaurants, five years seems a long time. But David Brandes, the Managing Director for Belgium-based company Piece of Meat, noted to Food Navigator that “bureaucracy and political interest” hold back the regulatory process, and that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)’s risk assessment process alone takes nine months.

Still, the European Commission has a clearly defined process for bringing cultured meat to market that is known as the Novel Food authorization, which makes it a logical market to try and bring a product into. For example, Mosa Meat, based in the Netherlands, has said it is focusing on Singapore and Europe for its first launches, specifically citing Europe’s Novel Food authorizations as a reason. Europe is also home to many other cultured meat companies, including Blue Biosciences, Mirai, and CellulaREvolution.

On the other hand, many have their sights set on the U.S. as the next destination for the sale of cultured meat. In 2019, the FDA and the USDA issued a formal agreement to jointly oversee regulation of cultured meat using existing frameworks. (The framework does not apply to cultured seafood, which is regulated exclusively by the FDA.)

U.S.-based companies are still leading the cultured meat industry, too, and have attracted huge amounts of investment in the recent past, including Memphis Meats’ $161 million round in 2020, BlueNalu’s $60 million fundraise, and, of course, Eat Just’s recent $200 million fundraise. The latter — still the only cultured meat company in the world cleared to sell a product — hasn’t explicitly said it will next launch commercially in the U.S. In a recent conversation, Eat Just founder and CEO Josh Tetrick only hinted, saying “I think it’s more likely than not that we’ll see clearance sometime in the next two years. I hope it’s this year — we’re going to be ready if it is. But it’s hard to tell.”

Additionally, California-based BlueNalu has said its products will launch in the second half of 2021, though it hasn’t yet said where. And an organization known as the Alliance for Meat, Poultry, and Seafood Innovation, which includes Memphis Meats, New Age Meats, Eat Just, and others, is dedicated to advancing the reach of cultured meat in the U.S.

Let’s also keep one eye on Israel. While its a smaller market than the U.S. or Europe, the country is like Singapore in that its government is very keen on advancing cultured meat. That includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyah, who in December of last year became the first head of state to taste cultured meat. He noted at the time that Israel will “become a powerhouse for alternative meat and alternative protein.”

Israel is also home to the world’s first restaurant dedicated to cultured meat, SuperMeat’s The Chicken. No products are sold their. Rather, consumers apply to gain entry then give detailed feedback in exchange for tasting the company’s cultured meat product. (Spoiler alert: it’s chicken.) 

There are also a growing number of companies coming from Israel, including Aleph Farms, Future Meat, and MeaTech 3D, which already publicly trades on the Tel Aviv stock exchange. 

Worth noting is that MeaTech 3D has also filed to go public in the U.S., which may suggest where its sights are set in terms of initial commercialization. Future Meat, too, has also said it plans to launch in the U.S. by 2022 via restaurants and direct-to-consumer sales. So while Israel may not necessarily be host the world’s second commercial sale of cultured meat, it may well provide the companies doing so elsewhere. Say, in the U.S.

Other Headlines

Tyson’s Raised & Rooted Expands into Plant-Based Burgers, Brats and Italian Sausage. Tyson Foods’ plant-based protein brand, announced today that it is expanding its lineup with three new offerings: burgers, Bratwurst and Italian sausages. 

Sweden: Stockeld Dreamery Launching First Plant-Based Cheese This Week. Plant-based cheese startup Stockeld Dreamerly, will launch its first product, Stockeld Chunk, at select stores in Stockholm, Sweden on May 6. 

OmniFoods Plans to Launch Its Plant-Based OmniPork Products in the U.S. This Year. OmniPork, the plant-based meat line from Green Monday subsidiary OmniFoods, will launch in the U.S. later this year.

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.

Mosa Meat's steak tartare on white plate with garnishes

Cultured meat takes sides on CRISPR

In 2017, a patent assigned to Memphis Meats detailed a way to overcome one of cultured meats biggest obstacles. The startup would use CRISPR gene editing to create a small mutation in their cells. The mutation would inactivate two proteins and ultimately increase “replicative capacity of the modified cell populations indefinitely.” They had transformed unpredictable cells with a limited capacity into hyper-proliferative ones  equipped for industrial production.

Longevity and predictability are the obstacles all cultured meat start-ups face in the effort to bring production to scale. Commercial scale cultured meat will require a mass production of cells like no other project to date, but cells in question aren’t inherently capable of that kind of output. After a certain number of replications, the fat, muscle and connective tissue cells max out. They  begin to die off or lose control. Left to itself, cultured meat eventually becomes self-contaminating. 

CRISPR gene editing offers a work around, a cheap and accurate way to equip stem cells for industrial capacity and consistency. Muscle and fat stem cells that naturally peter out can be edited to divide forever. Induced pluripotent stem cells that easily veer off course can be reprogrammed to exclusively produce muscle cells, fat or connective tissue. 

“Technologies like CRISPR allow us to safely increase the quality of our cell growth, which means we will make meat that is tastier, healthier, and more sustainable than slaughtered meat,” Brian Spears, the co-founder and CEO of New Age Meats, told Business Insider last year. Ostensibly, genetic tweaks made using CRISPR could make industrial cell culture faster to market, more predictable, and more cost effective.

But while some start-ups make CRISPR gene editing intrinsic to their process, others are intentionally separating themselves from the technology. They’re concerned that genetically altering their cell lines could lead to regulatory hang-ups — if not in the US or Asia, then in Europe. They’re calling their cultured meat non-GMO.

Whether CRISPR is a GMO has been hotly debated since the technology was first adapted for research from bacterial defense systems. Unlike genetically modified organisms, which have had foreign genetic material inserted into their DNA and been edited in a way that couldn’t occur naturally, CRISPR alters an organism’s own DNA to exhibit the most desirable traits. 

“Scientifically I buy that it’s not a GMO,” Paul Mozdziak, a cell biologist at North Carolina State told me via Zoom, “but regulation is often based on more than science.” Mozdziak is also an affiliate of Peace of Meat, a B2B cultured meat company that’s decided against CRISPR. “Our profile is we are not going to do anything that can be construed in any way shape or form as GMO,” Mozdziak said.  The same is true of Mosa Meat, a cultured meat elite who produced the first lab-grown burger in 2013. The decision is partly because Mosa is in the European market which doesn’t have a favorable attitude toward CRISPR at all, said Joshua Flack, cell biologist and leader of Mosa Meat’s Stemness & Isolation team. But “It also makes scientific sense. It is a lot of work to engineer your cell lines in this fashion.There’s a lot of ground work in the beginning if you’re using CRISPR and engineering.”

For those that don’t go the CRISPR route, the key is identifying the optimal cell line, finding out exactly what those cells want, and then catering the entire process to them, Flack said. The non-GMO approach is about optimizing the process while CRISPR offers a way to “turn the thing on its head” by genetically optimizing the cell line.  

From a scientific standpoint, no one is challenging CRISPR’s potential. Mozdziak called it a “promising technology” for the entire industry and even expects US regulatory bodies to be fairly amenable to the technology. Meanwhile, Mosa Meat has invested in inhouse explorations using CRISPR for R&D purposes. “We have to understand the risks of not employing these strategies,” Flack said. “The potential upside is really massive.”

CRISPR could very well be the fastest and cheapest way to commercial scale, but it’s unclear how much that will matter in the long run. Which process will be first to market or which will be stalled in regulations? These questions are just proxies for the one question that we can’t answer yet. That is, what will people buy–and buy enough to disrupt the meat industry? Maybe this new age GMO debate ends like the last one: both sides proceed so customers have the option. But one thing is for sure, Flack said,  “if you can’t sell it at the end, the effort is wasted.”

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article contained a quote from Daan Luining, CTO of Meatable. For administrative reasons, that quote has been replaced with a quote from Brian Spears, CEO of New Age Meats, originally published by Business Insider.

SOSV and Mayfield Launch the Genesis Consortium to Aid Pre-Seed IndieBio Startups

Yesterday, venture fund SOSV announced a partnership with Mayfield to create the Genesis Consortium, which will invest alongside SOSV into pre-seed-state companies participating in SOSV’s IndieBio accelerator.

IndieBio is perhaps best known for helping startups with extremely disruptive concepts and technologies across multiple industries, including food. Memphis Meats, for example, was one of the earliest movers in the cell-based meat space. Geltor is developing non-animal-based protein for to create gelatin for foods, medicines, and cosmetics. 

That level of scientific and technological disruption, however, requires more time, funds, and faith to bring to fruition than would be the case with other kinds of tech companies. That’s one reason many bioengineering-focused startups get stuck, IndieBio’s Po Bronson told me this week. “To really translate the work of scientists often takes years, and we are often speeding that up at the pre-seed stage in our accelerators,” he said. “What we’ve found is that if we could deploy a little more money there at that pre-stage it can help the startups have the runway, time and get more data to prove that they’re really worth the seed funding.”

In other words, the conundrum is that firms typically want companies to show them results before they invest, but companies need the cash in order to get those results.

That’s where the Genesis Consortium comes in. To be clear, this is not a new fund, but rather a “small pool of money,” in Bronson’s words, to help pre-seed-stage companies at IndieBio develop their ideas and technologies. Currently, IndieBio funds about 50 startups with $250,000 each annually. Beginning in 2021, the Genesis Consortium plans to increase that number to $500,000 for each pre-seed startup, according to SOSV’s press release.

As far as the kinds of companies it will invest in, Bronson told me they will continue to work with startups trying to advance entire industries, including food, through science and technology that address both human and planetary health, and the connection between those two areas. These are not incremental technologies that iterate on existing concepts. Instead, these startups are typically rethinking entire industries.  

And while extra funds are an important part of the package these pre-seed startups will get, they’re not the only tool necessary for turning an idea into a business. Especially when it comes to areas like engineering biology, translating an idea into an actual business is where a lot of companies get hung up. A group of scientists must learn how to communicate their ideas and business in a way that can resonate with not just potential investors but also future markets.

“You cannot just be a scientist. You have to be leading a movement in your space and that means communicating and learning to translate,” Bronson explained. He adds that the IndieBio program is “really good” at getting companies through this particular hurdle through its training.

Getting companies over that hurdle is something IndieBio is known for and will continue with the Genesis Consortium. The hope is that through the initiative, a greater number of visionary VCs and corporates will be able to invest in the kinds of ideas that might not otherwise receive the attention (and money) needed to translate them into businesses that can fundamentally change markets.

Memphis Meats Raises $161M, Doubling Global Investment in Cultured Meat

Today Memphis Meats, a Berkeley, CA-based startup making cell-based meat, announced it has closed a $161 million Series B funding round. The round was led by SoftBank Group, Norwest and Temasek, with participation from big names like Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Kimbal Musk, Cargill, Vulcan Capital, Fifty Years, and more. In total, Memphis Meats has raised just over $180 million.

Talk about some serious moneys. According to an email from the Good Food Institute, this massive raise more than doubles the total amount invested in cultured meat globally (up until now, all companies combined had only raised $155 million).

With its fresh capital, Memphis Meats plans to build a pilot production facility and continue to push towards launching its first cell-based product.

As to when that will be . . . we don’t exactly know. Despite having the most funding of any cultured meat company, Memphis Meats still has yet to announce when it expects to launch its first product — or even what that product will be.

When I asked David Kay, Memphis Meats’ Senior Communications Manager, at SKS 2019 back in October, he said that there are two reasons they’re holding back on a concrete launch date. First, they want to wait until they can guarantee that their product is both tasty and scalable, so as not to scare off any curious consumers. Second — and perhaps more importantly — they’re going to wait until regulatory frameworks for cultured meat are solidly established.

According to multiple experts I’ve spoken to in the cell ag field, regulatory hurdles are the main reason that cell-based meat and seafood has not already gone to market (and one of the reasons it might first be sold in Asia). As the first cellular agriculture company in the U.S., Memphis Meats is operating with an abundance of caution so as not to derail the regulatory approval process. In fact, the startup is one of the founders of a new coalition to speed up cell-based meats’ path to market.

It may not have announced plans about when it’ll bring its meat to market, but Memphis is clearly already planning for a future where it’ll make massive amounts of product. The company joins BlueNalu and Israel-based Future Meat Technologies, both of whom have also announced plans to build large facilities to produce massive quantities of cell-based meat and seafood.

With $161 million more in its pocket, that future is looking a lot closer for Memphis Meats.

David Kay on Why Consumers Will Love Cultured Meat (Just as Soon as It Gets to Market)

When talking about cultured meat (that is, meat made without animal slaughter), one of the first names that comes up in conversation is Memphis Meats. This Silicon Valley startup was the first company to start serious development in the cell-based meat space four years ago, and they are still on the cutting edge today.

We invited Memphis Meats’ Senior Manager of Communications and Operations (also its first employee), David Kay, to speak about the potential of cell-based meat at the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS) next month alongside Lou Cooperhouse of BlueNalu. But we got a little eager, so we went ahead and asked Kay a few questions about the meat alternative revolution and how he thinks consumers will react to eating meat grown in a bioreactor.

Check out the interview below then grab your tickets to SKS. They’re going fast!

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Memphis Meats is growing animal meat without the animal. Give us a high-level explanation of how you do that.
We start by obtaining animal cells from high-quality livestock animals. We figure out which of these cells are most capable of self-renewal and which ones give us the potential to express the characteristics we desire with respect to taste, texture and aroma. Once we select these cells we feed them nutrients. The nutrients are, at a high level, the same nutrients that the cells would get in nature — amino acids, water, oxygen, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals. The cells grow, multiply, and create muscle tissue (aka meat). At scale, this will take place in a facility that is similar to a beer brewery. We call this process “essential nutrition” because we can produce just the meat consumers desire and nothing more.

What’s the reasoning behind developing cultured meat?
With the global population expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, demand for meat is expected to double. But given the amount of resources modern livestock production requires today — a third of the world’s arable land and fresh water — we simply won’t be able to meet that demand. At Memphis Meats, we want to enable our food system to feed an increasingly hungry planet while preserving both the planet and cherished culinary traditions. We expect cell-based meat production will coexist with conventional meat production, and that together these methods will meet demand.

When will we actually be able to eat cell-based meat? When do you guess it will first enter the market and how long will it take before it’s available in your average supermarket?
While we are working as fast as we can to bring a product to market, we are also cognizant that our number one priority as a food company – and as a nascent industry – must be ensuring product safety and consumer trust. Key to this is establishing a sensible regulatory framework. We are committed to providing consumers with Memphis meat through appropriate regulatory channels. While other innovative industries might follow the “move fast and break things” Silicon Valley ethos, we firmly believe that our product release must be done in a responsible and transparent manner.

Why is communication such a critical aspect of the alternative protein revolution?
From the earliest days at Memphis Meats, we have seen communication as a crucial responsibility of cell-based meat companies, and a necessary tool for establishing trust with consumers. We had our media debut, including a viral video of the world’s first cell-based meatball, when we were less than six months old and had only four team members. Since then we have regularly updated the public as we’ve reached milestones in product development, regulation, fundraising and our growing team. We want to empower consumers to make their own decisions. We are confident that, if provided with the facts, consumers will be enthusiastic about cell-based meat.

What do you think is the biggest hurdle cultured meat has to face? Consumer acceptance? Regulatory issues? Labeling pushback?
We will be ready to go to market as soon as a regulatory path is established in the U.S. We are grateful for the speed and openness that both agencies have demonstrated so far in regulatory conversations, and we look forward to continuing to provide them with the information they need to make informed decisions.

Keep an eye out for more speaker Q&A’s as we ramp up to our fifth year of SKS on October 7-8 in Seattle! We hope to see you there.

What’s in a Name (for Lab-grown Meat)?

A classic Portlandia sketch is one about the organic chicken served in a restaurant. In it, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein ask a server increasingly specific questions about the origins of the poultry they are about to order.

If you thought choosing between organic, grass-fed, free-range, GMO, and locally sourced animal proteins was tough, just wait a few years, because the rise of lab-grown meats is going to add an entirely new layer of complexity to what and how we label our meat choices.

Portlandia - In the restaurant

Lab grown meats aren’t even widely available yet, but they’re enough of a concern that the United States Cattlemen’s Association (USCA) filed a petition with the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, asking for new beef labeling requirements.

From the USCA’s petition:

USCA requests that FSIS limit the definition of beef to product from cattle born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner. Specifically, FSIS should require 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.

The USCA wants to make sure that anything labeled “beef” or “meat” in your grocery store or restaurant comes straight from a once-living cow, without a stopover in a lab.

But you can understand why the USCA might have a, well, beef with these newcomers, as lab-grown meat has received a lot of investor interest recently. Just last week, Tyson Foods announced it had invested an undisclosed sum of money into Memphis Meats, which also counts Cargill and Bill Gates among its investors. Then there’s SuperMeat, the Israeli company that raised $3 million last month for its lab-grown chicken. And lest we forget, Leonardo DiCaprio invested in Beyond Meat last summer.

Before we go any further, let’s pause to accept--and then set aside--the larger moral and philosophical issues that we will have to wrestle with as lab-grown meats become more mainstream. Those are very real, and deserve their own blog post. But before we can even start to have a serious discussion about those issues, we need to solve the basic question about what names we’ll even use.

First, there’s the big question of what we call the entire category. “Lab meat” or “cultured meat” or “clean meat” are options, and each come with their own set of implications. For example, does “clean meat” mean everything else is “dirty?”

From there, things get more complex. Even among just Memphis Meats and SuperMeat, there will different labeling issues. Both currently use animal serum to grow their lab-cultured meat, but both are also working on methods that don’t require any animal byproduct. Each version will require their own label to give conscientious consumers more informed decisions (and to provide a marketing hook). Then there’s Beyond Meat, which isn’t meat at all but made from pea-protein—but is sold in the meat aisle at the grocery stores.

Now imagine going to the store to buy a burger in a couple of years. Your options will be ground beef from once-alive cows, animal serum-based lab meat, non-animal-serum lab meat, and plant-based patties that “bleed.” One can only imagine how new sub-categories will pop up to match existing labels such as “organic,” “non-GMO,” and “local.”

And that doesn’t even touch on the animal proteins being grown from other animals such as SuperMeat’s chicken and Finless Foods’ lab grown fish.

It’s a lot to think about, and we won’t solve it all here. In fact, it’s a topic I’m sure we’ll be discussing a lot here as new products come to market, names are tested and customers begin to show their preferences.

Personally, I’m excited for the expanded options and can’t wait to try them all. But what do you think? How should new lab-grown meats be labeled? Does the USCA have a legitimate point? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Lab-Grown Meat Just Got Another Shot of Investment

This week, Tyson Foods’ venture capital arm invested an undisclosed sum into San Francisco-based Memphis Meats, who is one of a few different companies developing lab-grown, cultured-meat alternatives.

Tyson joins DFJ Venture Capital, Bill Gates, Atomico, billionaires Suzy and Jack Welch, and several other investors. Those parties, along with heavyweight food producer Cargill, led a Series A funding round for Memphis Meats this past August that totaled $22 million.

Memphis Meats unveiled the world’s first cultured meatball in 2016, which was followed by the world’s first cultured poultry in 2017. The goal behind such products, along with those from companies like Mosa Meats, Finless Foods, SuperMeat, and Hampton Creek, is to offer consumers all the benefits of real meat without the environmental damages and foodborne illnesses associated with it.

To get it’s product, Memphis Meats uses on an ingredient called fetal bovine serum, a fascinating and slightly gross substance extracted from cow fetuses. The process of using fetal bovine serum won’t win the vegans over anytime soon, but it does enable the creation of an animal protein without the greenhouse gasses, deforestation, and host of other issues associated with raising livestock.

But cultured meat is expensive to produce, whether using fetal bovine serum or an animal-free method, as Memphis Meats is purportedly working on. Consider Mosa’s 1.2 million-per-pound lab-grown burger unveiled in 2013. And while the price of cultured meat is said to have dropped 99% since then, it’s still not low enough to make these products truly scalable (unless you’re okay with $6,000 chickens).

It’s technology that will eventually enable that scale. SuperMeat, for example, is developing technology to eliminate the need for animal serum. Finless Foods, meanwhile, has slashed prices by 50 percent and plans to have an affordable lab-grown bluefin tuna available by 2019. Memphis Meats aims to bring its product to market in 2021.

Lower costs will also make cultured meat a more realistic competitor to traditional meat products. Consumers spend about $1 trillion on meat globally, and demand is expected to double over the next few decades. Many are also betting on taste as the element that will convince traditional meat eaters to try alternatives. But it seems likely that alternative-meat producers will also need to offer competitively priced products in order to entice grill masters, tailgaters, and other die-hards.

I expect the future of alterna meat will be a combination of both lab-grown and plant-based products. Tyson’s investment in Memphis Meats also suggests we may see some acquisitions in the future, as more and more companies look to combine traditional meat products with science and technology to give the world its much-needed calories.

Is Cultured Meat the Future?

Tofu. Seitan. Tempeh. Blech. Current meat substitutes are—how can I say this—disgusting. And we all know that vegan cheezburger tastes nothing like a real burger or real cheese. But as Impossible Foods’ bleeding burger shows us, the landscape is changing rapidly. The next big trend? Cultured meat.

What the heck is cultured meat? Companies across the globe want to make real meat by growing a small tissue biopsy taken from a real animal (without hurting it) into a larger steak or chicken breast. Each has its own unique device to grow the biopsy and plans to market the product to grocery stores, restaurants, and even individual customers around the globe.

Of course, no one has made cultured meat at scale quite yet: They’re all about five years away from a finished product. SuperMeat, an Israeli biotechnology startup, raised over $200,000 and is now at the beginning of its R&D to create cultured chicken meat. Mosa Meat, a Dutch company, is working on ground beef and in 2013 made a single burger that cost more than $300,000 to produce. Meanwhile Memphis Meats, a California-based startup, is making cultured beef and pork and made a few meatballs earlier this year.

The World's First Cell-based Meatball - Memphis Meats

Though we’re pretty far away from an actual usable technology, the concept has deep implications. Vegans and animal rights groups like the idea that animals don’t have to suffer for us to eat meat, and those concerned with sustainability like the idea that we could produce meat without such a high tax on our land, water, and other natural resources.

So what do you think? Would you eat a burger made of cultured meat?