Lab-grown meat is all grown up.
This week Brazilian meat processing conglomerate JBS announced they had broken ground in Spain on its first commercial-scale cultivated meat production facility. According to the company, the new facility will produce more than 1,000 metric tons of cultivated meat per year, potentially expanding to 4,000 metric tons of production in the medium term, according to Reuters.
The new facility will be built by BioTech Foods, the packing giant’s Spanish subsidiary which the company acquired a 51% stake in 2021. In that $100 million deal, $41 million was earmarked for the production of the facility, which will be built in the heart of Spain’s culinary epicenter in San Sebastian.
While the facility is not the biggest cultivated meat factory in the world that’s been announced – that honor goes to (at least for now) Good Meat’s future facility, which they claim will produce 30 million pounds of cultivated meat – the JBS facility looks like it could be the biggest in Europe. While Gourmey’s plant announced last year looks like it will have a fairly massive physical footprint, the company has only vaguely alluded to a production capacity in the “10s of thousands of pounds” in cultivated meat. If JBS’s facility hits its initial production capacity target of one thousand metric tons, that pencils out to over two million pounds of cultivated meat annually. Expanding to its planned four thousand metric tons will mean 8.8 million pounds.
In quite the counter to the narrative that cultivated meat is unrealistic & plant-based is the only way, the world’s largest meat company shut down its plant-based meat plant in Colorado and is now building in its own cultivated meat plant in Spain.https://t.co/uqGfAt0ZQK
— Paul Shapiro (@PaulHShapiro) June 8, 2023
In reality, the actual pounds don’t matter so much as the symbolic nature of this move by the world’s biggest meatpacker. Also, considering that JBS is investing so heavily in cultivated meat just after the company closed its plant-based meat production facility in Denver, it’s a pretty bullish sign for a technology that has seen a rising chorus of critiques in recent months around its viability and climate impact claims.
BioTech Foods co-founder and CEO Iñigo Charola points to the instability around traditional ag supply chains as the impetus for JBS investing heavily in a cultivated meat future.
“With the challenges imposed on global supply chains, cultivated protein offers the potential to stabilize food security and global protein production,” Charola said in a statement.
All grown up, indeed.
Leave a Reply