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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Mission Barns

Cell Ag Startup Mission Barns Raises $24M for its Cultivated Fat

Mission Barns, a cellular agriculture startup creating cultured fat, announced today that it has raised a $24 million Series A round of funding. Investors in the round include Lever VC, Gullspang Re:Food, Humboldt Fund, Green Monday Ventures, and Enfini Ventures. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Mission Barns to more than $28 million.

Mission Barns is focused on cultivating animal fat, just without the animal. The company’s technology starts with pork, poultry or beef cells and grows them using plant-based feedstock in a cultivator. The result, the company says, is an animal fat that brings the same mouthfeel and flavor of meat without animal slaughter, and does so in a more environmentally friendly way than conventional animal agriculture.

Mission Barns has developed its own meat as well as in collaboration with other meat and plant protein partners. The company says applications include bacon, breakfast patties, burgers, nuggets, and more. In August of last year, Mission Barns held curbside taste tests of its cell-based bacon outside restaurants in San Francisco and Oakland, California.

The alternative fat space has steadily been growing over the past year, with a number of startups developing their own technology. Here in the U.S., Motif Foodworks is developing its own plant-based fat. Hoxton Farms is working on cultivated fat in the U.K. And in Australia, Nourish Ingredients is using yeast fermentation to create plant-based fat.

In today’s press announcement, Mission Barns says that it will use the new funding to scale up its production and build a pilot production facility in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Lever VC Launches Alt-Protein Fund for Early-Stage Companies

Alt-protein-focused venture capital firm Lever VC announced this week that it has launched a new fund targeting early stage plant- and cell-based protein companies. The Lever VC Fund I currently has $23 million in capital commitments, according to a company press release. 

Lever’s partners had previously invested in Beyond Meat, Impossible, Memphis Meats, and other notable alt-protein companies. Managing Partner Nick Cooney also founded the Good Food Institute, a non-profit for alternative protein companies.

Speaking this week to Food Navigator, Cooney said Lever’s new fund is doing 20 to 25 early stage investments that have so far been between $200,000 and “close to $1m.” He added that Lever tracks alt-protein companies in a proprietary database.

“For us as a sector specialist fund, we have the ability to really look across the board to identify the companies that are exciting but also have a valuation that makes sense from a risk return perspective,” he said. 

Lever has already invested roughly $5 million across 10 companies. Those companies include TurtleTree Labs, which makes cell-cultured human breastmilk, and Mission Barns, a company that recently made headlines for its cell-based bacon. Better Meat Co., GOOD PLANet Foods, The Good Spoon, and Bond Pet Foods, Avant, Grounded, Marvelous Foods, and A Dozen Cousins.

Globally, investment in alternative protein has already reached $1.1 billion in 2020 so far, which is almost double the total investment number for all of 2019. The pandemic is partly responsible for this huge uptick in interest in the category as consumers rethink their reliance on animal-based meats and dairy items. The entire market for alternative protein is expected to grow to $17.9 billion by 2025.

Lever said in today’s press release that it will continue to invest in early-stage companies working in the alt-protein space and remains open to additional investors until the Fund’s final close.

Mission Barns to Run Curbside Taste Tests for Its Cell-Based Bacon

Bacon lovers, take note. Berkeley, CA-based Mission Barns plans to run curbside taste tests of its cell-based bacon product outside San Francisco and Oakland restaurants in August (h/t Food Navigator).

Mission Barns gets its product by combining cell-cultured pork fat grown in bioreactors with plant-based protein. To do that, the company isolates cells from the animal, in this case the pig, and puts them in a warm cultivator where they grow just as they would inside the animal. Cells are then fattened and the tissue is harvested to create the “meat” portion of Mission Barns products.

On its website, Mission Barns says its process for creating “meat” is more sustainable than conventional livestock farming in terms of land and water use as well as greenhouse gas emissions. It’s also more humane, since the animal doesn’t actually have to be slaughtered to get the cells. 

As with all meat alternatives, though, taste is what will ultimately convert many consumers. To that end, Mission Barns is looking for “bacon lovers, experts, and aficionados” for this upcoming taste test, which is the first ever from the company. Potential “tasting consultants” must fill out an application. Once accepted, participants can sample the bacon in exchange for providing feedback to Mission Barns.

The company also told Food Navigator that it is testing new products with other food companies, including “one of the largest pork producers in the world.” 

Mission Barns has competition in the bacon realm from Higher Steaks, a UK-based startup that recently announced its lab-grown prototypes for bacon and pork belly. 

Overall, cell-based meat companies have received quite a bit of funding since the pandemic started surfacing some of the uglier realities of the conventional meat industry. New Age Meats recently raised an additional $2 million for its plant-based pork, while Integriculture nabbed $7.4 million in May and BlueNalu garnered $20 million in February.

This investment activity isn’t likely to slow. For the entire alternative protein category, investment has already surpassed the $1 billion mark, with more than $290 million of that going towards cell-based meat, according to a recent report from FAIRR.

Price parity still being an issue, it will be a while yet before consumers start actually bringing home the cell-based bacon. Mission Barns upcoming taste test should tell us more about how devoted bacon fans will react to cell-based versions of their favorite meat.