In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Oatly’s new barista milk for light-roasted coffee, European precision fermentation developments, and the world’s best vegan chef.
New products and launches
First announced to investors in its 2023 earnings call, Swedish oat milk giant Oatly has rolled out a new version of its barista milk, formulated specifically for light-roasted coffee. The Barista Lighter Taste offering has 2.1% fat content (versus 3% for the regular barista edition) and enables the more nuanced flavour notes of specialty coffee to shine.
Courtesy: Grubby
After delivering over 100,000 dishes together, UK vegan meal kit startup Grubby has extended its partnership with plant-based chef duo Bosh! They have developed a new range of 10 dishes that can be made in under 30 minutes, including Gochujang Tofu Mac & Cheese and Peanut Butter & Tenderstem Udon Soup.
Months after acquiring Swedish mycoprotein startup Mycorena, Belgian animal protein company Veos Group‘s Naplasol has expanded the former’s Promyc line with two new ingredients at the Food Ingredients Europe event in Frankfurt (November 19-21).
Courtesy: Chosen Foods
US avocado oil startup Chosen Foods has debuted a vegan shortening made with just one ingredient: fractionated avocado oil. It’s available online and at Target for $10.99 to $12.99 per 16oz tub.
Fellow US firm the Plant-Based Seafood Co. has added Crispy, Crunchy, Fried Shrimp to its Mind Blown range of vegan seafood products. It’s available online for D2C and foodservice for a limited time.
Seattle-based vegan chicken playerRebellyous Foods has launched a Spicy Kickin’ Patty for K-12 schools, restaurants, and food service providers. It meets the USDA National School Lunch Program’s requirements for two meat/meat alternate credits and offers 1/4 grain credit as well.
Courtesy: Rebellyous Foods
And German startup Ohly, which makes yeast-based bionutrients for the food industry, has expanded its X-Seed product line with new nutrients designed to boost enzyme production.
Company and finance updates
UK vegan confectionery brand Doisy & Dam has been sold by Nurture Brands to organic cocoa company Food Thoughts. The deal will see the formation of an ethical plant-based chocolate offering for home bakery and snacking goods.
Courtesy: Doisy & Dam
Across the Atlantic, vegan baked doughnut maker Drumroll has received a $3M investment from CPG incubator 7 Mile Brands.
The Global Agri-Food Advancement Partnership (GAAP), which supports agrifood companies with funds, incubators and labs, has invested an undisclosed amount in Argentinian molecular farming startup Ergo Bioscience. GAAP will host Ergo in its Saskatoon labs in the coming months to help expand its operations to North America.
Chipotle is the top US restaurant chain when it comes to plant-based options and meat reduction policies, according to a report by World Animal Protection that ranks 23 major companies on these metrics. McDonald’s, Wendy’s and chicken chains like KFC and Popeyes received a failing grade.
In Chicago, PlantX‘s XMarket Food Hall – the largest vegan food court in the Midwest – has closed after a year of operations.
Since opening in Berlin this April, the fully plant-based Rewe store has been welcoming 5,500 visitors every week.
Speaking of Berlin, fermentation-derived dairy startup Formo has kickstarted its first out-of-home marketing campaign.
Courtesy: Formo/LinkedIn
Also in Germany, the federal food and agriculture ministry has invested €400,000 in sausage producer Metten Fleischwaren‘s project to develop a blended sausage with mycoprotein and meat.
Meanwhile, Dutch meat giant Nutreco has opened what it claims is the world’s first facility dedicated to food-grade powder production for cell feed, in an inauguration event attended by several cultivated meat companies.
Courtesy: Nutreco
New Zealand startup Daisy Lab, which makes precision-fermented dairy proteins, has partnered with two dairy processors to supply its plug-and-play technology for large-scale production of bioidentical proteins.
Speaking of precision fermentation, French player Bon Vivant has released a life-cycle assessment that shows its animal-whey protein cuts greenhouse gas emissions by 72%, reduces water use by 81%, and requires 99% less land compared to conventional dairy.
Courtesy: Bon Vivant
In further news from this industry, Belgian precision fermentation startup Paleo and Austrian 3D-printed seafood producerRevo Foods have received a €2.2M grant from the EU’s Eureka Eurostars programme to develop animal-free myoglobin for vegan salmon.
British peanut butter maker ManiLife has invested over £1M in a new 13,5000 sq ft manufacturing facility that can store up to 15 million jars of peanut butter. Raising £500,000 to fund the move, the factory is set to begin production in early 2025.
Courtesy: The Better Meat Co
Californian mycelium startup The Better Meat Co has received its patent from the US Patent and Trade Office, which covers its innovative shelf-stable mycoprotein production process, methods of sizing and separating mycelium particles, and million process to turn the dry mycleium into a powder.
Policy developments and awards
In the UK, conservation agency the National Trust will make menus at its 300 food and drink outlets at least 50% plant-based, after 75% of its 2.6 million members voted in favour of the move to speed up its path to net zero. Around 40% of its existing catering options are plant-based.
Alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute has been recognised as one of Giving Green‘s top six climate impact charities globally for the third year running. It has recommended philanthropists to provide $2.1M in grants to the charity, contributing to its ongoing three-year raise of $125M.
Luxembourgish chef Steve Lentz has won the Best Vegan Chef title at the Global Chefs Challenge, who won over judges with a vegan foie gras and a cabbage-based dessert.
Time Magazine has recognised a cultivated meat technology as one of the year’s best inventions, alongside lab-grown cotton and an AI platform for functional plant-based ingredients.
As further proof of the technology’s potential for safeguarding the future of the planet and its food supply, cultivated meat has been recognised as one of the top inventions of the year.
Time Magazine’s list of the Best Inventions of 2024 comprises 200 innovations “changing how we live, work, play, and think about what’s possible”, and covers everything from consumer electronics and beauty to food, gaming and medical care.
It’s a tradition that dates back two decades, and is built on nominations from both Time’s editors and correspondents globally. Each contender is judged on factors like originality, efficacy, ambition, and impact.
This year, the list includes Dutch startup Meatable’s cultivated pork technology, Boston-based Galy’s lab-grown cotton, and Californian firm Brightseed’s AI-led Forager platform.
Courtesy: Jo Whaley/Time
Meatable recognised for world’s fastest cultivated meat tech
Meatable was chosen for Time’s Best Invention list because of its proprietary Opti-ox technology, which allows it to produce cultivated meat in just four days, faster than any other company in the space.
Within the industry, it’s common for producers to use immortalised cell lines, but these need to be altered to multiply indefinitely. Meatable’s technology, however, uses pluripotent stem cells (PSCs), which have the natural ability to multiply continuously and rapidly.
While it can be challenging to change PSCs into more specialised cells like muscle or fat, combining them with the Opti-ox technology enables the Dutch startup to produce fully differentiated muscle and fat cells in just four days. This is then combined with a perfusion process that allows Meatable to work in a continuous cycle and generate very high cell densities, increasing productivity and making it easier to scale up the process.
“We’re deeply honoured to be recognised by Time for our Opti-ox technology, which we believe is at the forefront of the cultivated meat revolution,” said Daan Luining, co-founder and chief innovation officer of Meatable.
Courtesy: Meatable
“With our planet’s resources under increasing pressure and demand for meat only growing, it’s evident that our current food system is unsustainable,” he added. “This acknowledgement from TIME is a tremendous validation of our approach, and of our incredible team working day and night to make this happen.”
Meatable is currently working with regulators in six countries to get its cultivated pork approved for sale, with authorisation in Singapore expected in the first quarter of 2025, as CEO Jeff Tripician revealed to Green Queen last month.
The startup is aiming to raise a Series C round around the $35M mark to add to the $95M it has secured from investors since it was founded six years ago. It will host a large tasting event in Singapore next February with investors, the company’s board and meat companies interested in incorporating the cultivated pork in their products.
“I see us moving with pretty good speed through 2025,” Tripician said, indicating that Meatable would use its Singapore application to file dossiers in countries that largely follow the same process. “At the end, I would be very disappointed in our team if we don’t have approval in five, six countries by this time or the end of next year,” he added.
Lab-grown cotton and plant-based compounds join Time’s Best Inventions list
Courtesy: Galy
Meatable wasn’t the only cellular agriculture company present on the Time Best Inventions of 2024 list. Galy may not be working on food, but it’s using a similar technique to grow bioidentical cotton, minus the huge amount of water, chemicals, or deforestation.
Galy takes cotton cells and cultivates them in large bioreactors by feeding them sugar. Once they’ve proliferated to the required volumes, it selectively activates and deactivates genes in the cells, transforming them into cotton fibre. The process is 10 times faster and 500 times more productive than conventional cotton farming, uses 99% less water, takes up 97% less land, and emits 77% less CO2.
“Cellular agriculture offers the best way to address environmental challenges at scale while producing a material with the same characteristics as traditional cotton,” Galy co-founder Luciano Bueno told Time. “With all due respect to agriculture, we believe we can produce the same thing in a lab facility, better.”
The startup recently secured $33M in a Series B round led by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, taking its total raised to $65M. It hasn’t been commercialised yet, but it counts H&M Group and Inditex (the parent company of Zara, Bershka, Stradivarius and more) as investors, and has secured agreements with several industry leaders, including health and pharma giant Suzuran Medical.
Courtesy: Brightseed
Another company working in the realm of future food is Brightseed, which was recognised by Time for its proprietary AI platform Forager. This helps it discover bioactive compounds found within plants to deliver health ingredients for functional food, beverages, supplements and specialised nutrition companies.
Brightseed, which closed a $68M Series B round in 2022, has assembled the largest library of natural mall molecule compounds anywhere in the world (with over seven million already), linking them to potential health benefits and allowing food companies – like Danone and Blue Diamond – to understand their bioactives and optimise their products accordingly.
“This recognition from TIME is a tremendous honour,” said Brightseed co-founder and CEO Jim Flatt. “Forager marks a significant technical breakthrough, enhancing our ability to explore nature for insights and ingredients that transform our diet into targeted tools for health and longevity. Together with our customers and partners, we look forward to delivering a new class of powerful and sustainable health innovations for consumers worldwide.”
This isn’t the first instance of Time recognising alternative protein and future food companies in its Best Innovations list. Since 2020, Impossible Foods‘s pork analogue, Perfect Day’s precision-fermented whey protein, Upside Foods and Good Meat‘s cultivated chicken products, and MeliBio‘s bee-free honey tech have all appeared on the list.
Research efforts for alternative proteins like plant-based and cultivated meat received €290M in funding last year, just as the number of studies on the topic proliferated.
The only way for alternative proteins to reach the mainstream is through advancing research into ingredients, technologies, and consumer needs.
So it’s an encouraging sign that 2023 saw record sums of money (€290M) granted to researchers in Europe exploring plant-based, cultivated, and fermentation-derived proteins.
Additionally, over a quarter (26%) of all alternative protein research published in Europe came out in 2023, totalling 472. Since 2010, the UK has produced the most amount of research on future food, publishing 255 papers, followed by Germany (243) and the Netherlands (199).
This is based on analysis by the Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe, which suggested that the findings signpost the region’s massive potential, but also underline that the field remains in its infancy and at risk of being held back due to a lack of international collaboration, an inconsistent approach to funding, and key technical areas being overlooked.
How research funding for alternative protein was distributed
Courtesy: GFI Europe
Within Europe, the EU collectively pumped in €252M for future food research, half of which was invested in 2023 and early 2024, chiefly from its Horizon Europe programme.
But when it came to individual countries, Denmark led the way with €96M, spearheading the Nordic nations’ leadership with alternative proteins. Collectively, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland invested a fifth of Europe’s total.
The UK was second on the list, with €90M invested in research, thanks to the establishment of a network of research hubs by state agency UK Research and Innovation.
Plant-based protein studies commanded the most funding (39%), followed by cross-cutting research that featured a combination of alternative protein pillars (31%). Meanwhile, 21% of these funds went into fermentation, and a tenth were dedicated solely to cultivated meat.
Meat was the most popular target end product for these publications, being the focus of 65% of research investments in 2023. Dairy was next with 16%, while seafood research projects received 8% of the share. That said, governments and funding institutions are increasingly embracing cultivated meat research, and public investments into fermentation are expected to surpass €100M for the first time this year.
The Netherlands topped in the cultivated meat segment with €67M invested, strengthening its foothold as a cultivated meat leader in Europe. It became the first EU country to approve and host public tastings for these proteins. Finland, meanwhile, put the most money into fermentation research (€54M).
Some of the headline commitments include the €38M set aside for alternative proteins in Germany’s federal budget, the European Innovation Council’s €50M investment for precision-fermented and algae-based foods, and the Dutch government’s €60M commitment for a cellular agriculture ecosystem.
With more major investments expected in the second half of this year – like the €27M invested in Bezos Earth Fund‘s Center for Sustainable Protein in London – 2024 is on track to equal or even surpass 2023’s record as the highest investment year, making it five straight years of increasing research funding.
European research urged to ramp up international collaboration
Courtesy: GFI Europe
The outlook for the alternative protein publishing system is much the same, with plant-based proteins the focus of 64% of publications in 2023. Unlike the funding environment, cross-pillar research publications were low (8%), trumped by cultivated meat (13%) and fermentation (16%).
But European researchers working on alternative proteins have been collaborating internationally to a much lower degree than the continent’s average, with only 39% of studies co-authored by colleagues from outside Europe, versus the 56% average for the EU and 64% for the UK.
GFI Europe highlights the potential for these researchers to have a global impact, since existing papers have accumulated thousands of citations in 144 countries, particularly India, the US and China.
Meanwhile, research into cultivated and fermentation-derived proteins remains underdeveloped, with the number of papers fluctuating and even falling in certain years. Studies into the technical advancements needed to commercialise alternative proteins also only scratch the surface, with many key areas – like designing fermenters for cultivated meat scale-up, reducing downstream processing costs for precision fermentation, and developing functional ingredients for plant-based meat – remaining underfunded.
While this highlights the nascency of these fields, GFI Europe argues that these technology areas should be prioritised in future investment, with new mechanisms that enable greater collaboration to solve the major challenges of cellular agriculture.
The report also suggests that the research community is “quite fragmented” and needs to achieve a higher degree of integration and cohesion, underlining the need for greater support to stimulate and sustain cross-border, interdisciplinary research.
At the same time, regional disparity is a challenge for this sector, with considerable differences found in the research output and career opportunities in different European countries. “Governments in underrepresented countries should explore mechanisms through which they can stimulate greater research activity in alternative proteins to capitalise on the follow-on economic benefits of innovation,” the report reads.
“This report puts Europe’s alternative protein research under the microscope, finding a rapidly growing field offering exciting opportunities – but also an inconsistent approach to funding and an urgent need to build a more coherent network,” said Stella Child, research and grants manager at GFI Europe.
She added: “To capitalise on this growing expertise and make sure innovations developed by European scientists can be commercialised here, governments and funding bodies must create more opportunities for alternative protein scientists to collaborate and provide dedicated funding to boost research in overlooked areas.”
In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Beyond Meat’s European exploits, a big week for plant-based milk in the US, and cultivated seafood’s national TV debut in Japan.
New products and launches
Plant-based giant Beyond Meat has partnered with foodservice operator SSP Group to bring the Beyond Burger to UK airports and train stations. It is available at 13 locations, including The Camden Bar & Kitchen at London Stansted and Brigg & Stow at Bristol Airport, and will be rolled out at another six in December.
Courtesy: Beyond Meat/SSP
Beyond Meat is also delivering on its promised expansion in Germany, expanding from freezers into the chilled aisles of Edeka, which now stocks burgers, hack (mince), sausages, and more.
Speaking of Bristol, local favourite VeBurger is opening a second location on Whiteladies Road in Clifton. It will give away 100 free vegan burgers on day one.
Across the Atlantic, Slutty Vegan‘s location in Birmingham, Atlanta is reopening months after it was temporarily shut, but this time under new ownership. Company founder Pinky Cole has gifted the restaurant to its former general manager Reatta Hall, a local resident who has been at the company for three years.
London-based Grounded has brought its clean-label plant protein milkshakes to the US, with Whole Foods Market carrying its chocolate and mint-chocolate variants in 150 stores across both coasts.
Courtesy: Rebbl
In more milkshake news, Californian functional beverage maker Rebbl has launched a line of vegan protein shakes with 26g of protein per bottle. They are powered by EverPro, an upcycled barley protein developed by AB InBev’s EverGrain, and come in chocolate, vanilla, and cookies and creme flavours.
Californian juicer manufacturer Nama has unveiled its M1 Plant-Based Milk Maker, which can produce “barista-quality milk” in under two minutes, alongside infused oils, soups and flavoured waters. It’s available in North America for $400.
Courtesy: Nama
On the opposite coast, New York-based Edenesque has introduced its debut line of “chef-crafted” milk alternatives, featuring unsweetened and barista oat milks, and a barista pistachio-cashew milk.
Also in New York, Elmhurst 1925 has released a limited-edition OatNog for the holiday season, made from a base of oats and cashews.
Courtesy: Silk
Another US alt-dairy launch comes from Danone-owned Silk, which has rolled out an oat milk for kids aged five and over with 8g of protein per serving, alongside DHA omega-3, choline, and prebiotics.
In Italy, vegan cheesemakerDreamfarm has expanded its lineup with a new almond and cashew ricotta, which is currently available exclusively at Esselunga ahead of an EU-wide launch.
Courtesy: Dreamfarm
And Australian firm Pectin 360 has teamed up with The Original Juice Company to transform food waste into pectin and fibre. The two will set up a pilot plant with an undisclosed research and commercialisation entity, with the aim of saving over 10,000 tonnes of citrus peels and apple pomace waste annually.
Company and finance updates
In Canada, Modern Plant-Based Foods has acquired vegan pet food startup AnimalKind, marking its expansion beyond human food products.
Courtesy: AnimalKind
French firm C&DAC has brought in €1.6M ($1.7M) from Yeast, ILP Group, and Alsace Business Angels to speed up the development of its fermented legume-based flour for the plant-based industry.
Polish food waste platform Foodsi, which allows restaurants and stores to sell discounted surplus food, has raised €1.2M ($1.3M) in a seed extension, taking its round’s total value to €2.5M ($2.7M).
US biomanufacturing firm Liberation Labs has secured a $3.5M investment to support the ongoing construction of its large-scale precision fermentation facility in Richmond, Indiana. It comes ahead of its Series A round, which is expected to close at $37.5M.
Courtesy: Liberation Labs
Also in the precision fermentation realm, Chicago’s Hydrosome Labs – whose H2O technology can double yields and decrease production time by up to 25% – has bagged $3.7M to scale up operations to improve nutrient uptake in skincare and provide enhanced hydration in performance drinks.
German dairy giant Hochland, which has been around for almost 100 years, has joined Food Fermentation Europe, a coalition of companies aiming to advance regulatory approvals of novel fermentation-derived proteins.
In sadder news, molecular farming startup Tiamat Sciences has announced that it ceased operations a few months ago, a decision it attributed to “financial constraints”. As of last year, it had raised $5M in total funding.
Courtesy: Meatable/Green Queen
Dutch cultivated pork startup Meatable, Chilean biotech firm Sticta Biologicals, and the University of Chile‘s Center for Mathematical Modeling have been awarded a research grant by the Good Food Institute to develop a precise and genome-scale metabolic model of porcine cells.
Finnish state investor Business Finland has granted €10M ($10.8M) in R&D funding to FoodID and FinBioFAB for projects to create alternative proteins and materials, which have been accepted into the Global Centers research programme led by the US National Science Foundation. Participating collaborators include Onego Bio, Enifer, Fazer, MeEat, and others.
The US Department of Agriculture has announced $1.5B in grants for 92 partnership projects to advance nature conservation and climate-smart agriculture, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Farm Bill.
Courtesy: Melbourne City FC
Hong Kong-based alt-dairy giant Vitasoy has agreed to be a shirt sponsor for A-League club Melbourne City FC. The brand’s logo will appear on the men’s team’s training shirt and shorts for the 2024-25 season, alongside LED signage at AAMI Park.
Alternative protein advocacy group ProVeg International has opened an outpost in Brazil, its first office in South America. It comes months after it set up an office in Portugal.
Policy and research developments
New York startup Pureture, which has been working on a vegan casein alternative, has developed a yeast-based protein with a complete amino acid profile to match the muscle recovery and growth attributes of casein and whey.
Courtesy: Pureture
The China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment has released new safety assessment materials for GMOs used in food processing trials, a regulatory step that can help commercialise precision-fermented foods in the country.
Further progress for precision fermentation comes from the Netherlands, whose House of Representatives has voted in favour of allowing public tastings of foods made from this technology. The agriculture ministry will now consult with stakeholders on the motion’s contents.
Courtesy:
Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
Researchers in the US have created a prototype of cultivated pork grown on a new scaffold: kafirin proteins isolated from red sorghum grain.
The City of West Hollywood, California has unanimously voted to endorse the Plant Based Treaty, calling on the federal administration and other national governments to negotiate a Global Plant Based Treaty.
Courtesy: Oato
PETA UK has announced the winners of its Vegan Food Awards 2024, with La Fauxmagerie, Oato, Strong Roots, One Planet Pizza, and Lurpak among those receiving honours.
Yelp, meanwhile, has published its list of the best 100 vegan restaurants in the US, based on user reviews. Lil’ Vegerie in Redondo Beach, California bagged the top spot.
Courtesy: Yelp
Finally, cultivated seafood has made it to Japanese TV, with actor Keita Machidaexplaining the concept on featuring on an episode of Manga Artist Ienaga’s Complex Society Redefined.
Singapore’s Umami Bioworks, which is working on commercialising cultivated fish products, has launched a pathogen detection tool for the seafood industry. Here’s why.
Umami Bioworks, a pioneer in the cultivated seafood world, is taking a dip in rather traditional waters to fix the ailing seafood value chain.
The Singapore-based startup has launched Arbiter, a biotech tool to address the challenges of seafood safety and quality via pathogen detection and quality assessments. The move marks what the company calls a “pivotal expansion” of its biotech offerings beyond cultivated meat and pet food to help a number of industry sectors.
Arbiter is a nucleic-acid-based testing platform that offers “unprecedented precision, speed, and cost-effectiveness with higher sensitivity, breadth, and quantification than current pathogen detection methods”. It can detect up to 800 unique targets in a single run, with actionable results in under six hours.
Apart from equipping seafood companies with the ability to detect pathogens early, it significantly reduces labour intensity, with only 15 minutes of prep time needed for up to 50 samples. Umami Bioworks believes the cost efficacy – each target costs less than $1 – will “democratise and universalise” pathogen diagnostics and quality control.
The company acknowledges that while it’s known for cell cultivation, the tool is a strategic move to establish solutions for broader markets. For example, it claims Arbiter can transform disease diagnosis in species like salmon, shrimp, and tilapia, which minimises economic losses linked to infectious diseases.
In addition to food safety and quality assurance, the tool offers new capabilities for environmental monitoring to protect aquatic ecosystems from harmful pathogens.
We spoke to Mihir Pershad, founder and CEO of Umami Bioworks, about the company’s move, which comes amid its aggressive expansion strategy – apart from Singapore, it either has a base or partnerships in Malaysia, South Korea, India, the US, and the UK, and is pursuing regulatory approval in multiple markets.
Here’s why Umami Bioworks decided to broaden its horizons.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
Courtesy: Umami Bioworks
Green Queen: Why did you decide to launch the pathogen detection tool?
Mihir Pershad: We came up with the idea for this food safety and quality solution to address a problem within our cultivated production platform: how to streamline batch quality and safety testing in a production factory. We developed a highly streamlined solution that would allow us to assess food safety and quality within a single test with significantly higher sensitivity and time to results compared to traditional approaches.
We realised that this solution could potentially address a much larger problem of food safety and quality monitoring if we launched it as an individual product offering, rather than only packaging it with our cultivated production licenses, and so decided to launch Arbiter as an independent product.
GQ: Are you pivoting to serve the seafood industry directly?
MP: Umami’s mission is to serve as a gateway for creating a healthier, more flavorful, regenerative future for humanity where we envision a world in which we can sustainably feed humanity while rewilding 50% of our planet. Thus, we see Arbiter as a new product that falls squarely in the scope of our mission to help build a better food system.
In fact, our core business is delivering cultivated seafood biomanufacturing capability to the traditional seafood industry via a “factory as a product” model. We believe that the cultivated approach to seafood production is critical to achieving our vision, but we also believe we can do a tremendous amount of good by bringing solutions to market that can also improve the efficiency of current production approaches.
Courtesy: Umami Bioworks
GQ: Is this meant as a second revenue stream, in addition to your cultivated seafood goals?
MP: Given the advantages in cost savings, throughput, and time to results, we believe Arbiter is a compelling leap forward in routine food safety and quality testing.
Getting validation and adoption in the market will demonstrate some of the value Umami’s core platform can offer, particularly in areas like quantifying seafood product quality for more robust grading and quality assessments, while building trust with seafood industry customers that Umami can deliver additional value down the road.
GQ: Is the idea that this tech will help convince seafood companies to commit to/invest in cultivated seafood?
MP: As a bioplatform business, our goal is to build multiple product offerings on the core foundation of our platform knowledge, where each product solves a meaningful problem aligned with our company mission.
We certainly believe that Umami can deliver real value to seafood industry customers with Arbiter and that we can address long-standing challenges with pathogen detection and quality verification.
By creating value and solving problems that cross both traditional seafood and cultivated production, we can also build trust with customers, which will be critical as we start to bring cultivated seafood to market at scale.
Courtesy: Umami Bioworks
GQ: Disease detection tech seems quite a different direction in terms of resource allocation and talent requirements than cultivated seafood – what is your strategy for this?
MP: It is true that delivering Aribter capability to customers may require a different commercial approach from selling cultivated seafood factories, but there is more potential for shared resourcing within Umami than is likely apparent.
In fact, food safety and quality testing was a core challenge we had to address to bring cultivated seafood to market. To be able to deliver factories to customers at scale, we also needed to be able to deliver rapid, robust testing capability that could validate the quality of the seafood our factories would be producing.
That insight was what led us to pursue the development of Arbiter, as an internal solution initially and now as an independent product.
In a detailed opinion, the EU Commission has rejected the evidence provided by Hungary to justify banning cultivated meat, alongside a number of other member states.
At the EU’s Agriculture and Fisheries (Agrifish) Council meeting in July, the Hungarian presidency called for efforts to “protect” Europe’s culinary traditions from novel foods like cultivated meat. It was a move welcomed by Italy and Austria, which (along with France) led a similar effort at the council’s January meeting.
Essentially, what Hungary was proposing was a ban on cultivated meat, which Italy had become the first country to introduce last year. France and Romania have floated similar proposals in their parliament too.
But in a detailed opinion published by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm has opposed these legislative attempts, throwing doubt on Hungary and other countries’ proposed restrictions, as well as Italy’s ban.
Commenting specifically on the Hungarian proposal, the EU Commission noted that all novel foods are subject to the European Food Safety Authority’s (EFSA) pre-market authorisation process. If approved, the product is placed on the EU-wide novel food list. But since no cultivated meat company has received the greenlight in the region so far – the first application was filed in July by France’s Gourmey – a ban is “unnecessary”.
“The prohibition to market it results from Union law and applies to all the Union territory,” the Commission stated.
“The scientific assessment to be performed by EFSA within the procedure for the authorisation of novel foods is aimed to ensure that foods to be placed on the EU market are safe and do not present risk for human health,” it added.
“A ban is therefore unjustified, since it could pre-empt the harmonised authorisation procedure for novel foods at EU level, which includes a scientific assessment by EFSA.”
EU Commission opinion puts cultivated meat bans in jeopardy
Courtesy: Mosa Meat
The EU Commission’s comment was in response to a Technical Regulations Information System (TRIS) notification submitted by Hungary – this is a procedure aimed at preventing the creation of barriers to the free movement of goods among member states.
“In addition to the protection of human health and the environment, the sustainable production of agriculture and the preservation of the traditional rural way of life justify the introduction of regulation,” the TRIS notification read, suggesting that it is unclear how the safety of cellular agriculture can be guaranteed (although that is exactly what the EFSA does).
“Traditional livestock-based meat production is of paramount importance for the future of the domestic food economy, in particular the sustainability of food production and the retaining power of the countryside,” it continued. “Increased production of laboratory-grown meat can have an adverse impact on the agricultural sector and rural living conditions as a whole.”
Italy had already sparked some controversy with its TRIS notifications earlier. The process allows fellow member states to give their opinion on bills that can hinder the EU free market, before it is approved by the country. Italy withdrew its first note attempting to ban cultivated meat, knowing it would have been rejected by the bloc.
But it still went ahead and banned cultivated meat anyway – potentially unlawfully – before presenting a second TRIS notification, which the EU closed because the law was already in place.
To avoid this mess, Hungary did not implement the ban before the Commission and member states got a chance to voice their opinions.
“The Hungarian proposal clashes with the principles of European law, just as would have happened with the Italian law if it had complied with the TRIS procedure,” explained Francesca Gallelli, public affairs consultant at the Good Food Institute Europe. “Both bans are unfounded, as they are not based on scientific evidence, especially considering that cultivated meat is not yet available to European consumers.”
She added: “The Italian law is also potentially unenforceable since it was notified to the European Union after being approved, in violation of the TRIS procedure.”
Across the Atlantic, a host of states in the US are attempting to restrict cultivated meat too, including Arizona, Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Two states – Florida and Alabama – have already banned it.
Member states step up in favour of cultivated meat
Courtesy: Meatable/Green Queen
Hungary’s explanation for the attempted ban wasn’t just rejected by the EU Commission’s assessment of the TRIS notification, but also by several member states.
Sweden noted that the reasons justifying the move to ban cultivated meat because it’s harmful to human health were “unacceptable”, highlighting that Hungary hasn’t provided any risk evaluations or demonstrated that these products might threaten human or planetary health.
The Czech Republic also disagreed with the proposal, citing the obstacles to the EU free market and outlining its support for the “development of innovations in food technologies, including laboratory-grown meat”. It stressed the need to “respect the existing EU legal framework”.
Another country against the ban was Lithuania, which posted a detailed opinion that also underscored the potential of alternative proteins. The country pointed out how the global population will peak by 2080 and demand much higher amounts of protein. “The development of the alternative protein industry will generate new, high value-added jobs and promote the integration of businesses into international value chains and the export of high value-added food products,” it said.
Lithuania’s response added: “Given that countries such as the US, Israel, and Singapore already allow the sale of these products, it is important that the EU remains competitive in the development of these technologies and dictates the conditions for regulation and standards globally.”
Finally, the Netherlands – a cultivated meat leader in Europe – expressed doubt that an “absolute ban” is proportionate to any issues presented by these proteins, and believed that the policy objective can be achieved in “an alternative, less far-reaching way, without introducing a ban on a product that has not yet been placed on the market”.
It presented another case against the ban: cultivated meat can economically benefit farmers. “The possibility of in-vitro meat production on a farm has been investigated and found feasible, and in the Netherlands, livestock farmers have already come forward who want to investigate how this production can be achieved on their farm,” it said.
“Stimulating this development can therefore also ensure the preservation of the agricultural sector and make it futureproof, thus providing an alternative way to achieve the Hungarian goals.”
Hungary now has until mid-January 2025 to respond to the issues raised. The EU Commission has also warned that if the country doesn’t comply with the obligations or goes ahead with the ban without taking these objections into account, it could take the matter to the European Court of Justice.
Meatable’s Jeff Tripician on his journey from meat industry veteran to cultivated meat CEO, why these proteins should be more expensive, the company’s upcoming Series C round, and its global regulatory plans.
“It’s just a very practical conversation,” says Jeff Tripician. The current demand for eight billion people is taxing the food system. You have rising emissions, alarming rates of soil degradation, a huge amount of freshwater used to feed and grow animals that we eat.
“What do you do 25 years from now, when [the demand for meat] is 70% bigger, there are two billion more people, and developing countries eating more?” he asks. “Hell, that’s why I joined this.”
The ‘this’ Tripician is referring to is Meatable, the Dutch startup making cultivated meat. He joined as CEO in May, taking over from co-founder Krijn de Nood (who remains on the board). His appointment was a marker of the company’s plans to expand in the US, leveraging his decades-long experience as a meat industry executive.
“I was part of the meat industry. I’ve run these companies, and I don’t have an answer to that question,” Tripician, who has worked at Perdue Farms and Grass Fed Foods, tells me. “I don’t know if cultivated meat is the perfect answer, [but] I know that it has huge positives.”
It can do in 12 days what takes a pig eight months, or a cow two to three years. There’s minimal waste, a fraction of the land and water use, and a dramatic reduction in emissions. “It does a lot of things, and it does it at once, at scale, and at a price that’s reasonable,” suggests Tripician.
“In our case, the taste is so close to conventional pork that if you use it as an ingredient, like a sausage, or in a taco, burrito, or meatball, you cannot tell the difference. Because it’s real meat, it comes from real pig cells.
“So you sit there. You go: ‘If this isn’t the answer, I would like to know what is.’ And you hear nothing. The meat industry goes: ‘Well, we’ve already invested in all of this, so we’ll just continue to push.’ If they’re successful, they further stress the planet. If they’re unsuccessful, they don’t have enough meat to feed the planet. Which is worse?”
Cultivated meat appeals to tech-savvy Gen Z
Courtesy: Meatable/Green Queen
Tripician the company has had a “big change” in approach: “The role of Meatable is to help meat companies gain access to more meat. We’re a supplier to them. We show them the technology. We transfer the technology so they can do what they do. They take raw material – meat – they turn it into food, and they sell it. We now provide them with some of the meat. Very simple.”
Meatable conducted a survey of 500 chefs in the US, 60% of whom said they’d put its cultivated pork on the menu, alongside the message and the brand name. It then polled thousands of consumers – while older ones were more apprehensive, younger Americans were excited.
In Tripician’s mind, there are two ways meat companies (this includes plant-based) can cater to the growing protein demand. The first involves combining a plant-based product – which “just doesn’t taste as good” – with a percentage of cultivated cells. This hybrid route is what’s currently being taken by most cultivated meat startups right now.
The problem here is that “there’s a younger consumer that says food is supposed to do more than provide calories and nutrition”. Indeed, taste is the most important purchase driver for nearly three-quarters of Gen Zers in the US.
That’s where the second approach comes in. “You take your conventional product, add in some Meatable, and now some of that is helping make it a better place. I think that’s a route that would work, and it’s cost-effective at that size.”
He points out how younger Americans are holding sustainability dearer than perhaps older generations do. Their purchasing power is massive, and they’re not afraid to switch to a different brand if it doesn’t meet their ethical needs.
“So if the meat industry wants to help itself, they should say: ‘I’ll put some of those things on the shelf with my name on it, not Meatable’s name, and have those consumers go: ‘Great!’” says Tripician.
“We saw it with plant-based,” he adds. “People tried it, didn’t really buy it again, it fell off dramatically. That’s fixed simply with a taste. Change the taste, change the texture. We tested that at about a 25-30% blend. For an average person, you could not tell the difference between that and a 100% pork product.”
‘I won’t tell billion-dollar meat companies what to do’
Courtesy: Meatable
Meatable has been using similar rations for its tastings. The company held two events in Singapore last year, and one at its Leiden headquarters in the Netherlands in April – this was the first on EU soil.
“We try to keep investors and government agencies and so on, just give them a chance [to try], because they can’t go buy it yet. Really, Singapore is the only place that’s embraced it – we do regular tastings there,” says Tripician.
“It brings the media into the discussion and parties that can influence positive outcomes. It was really well received. We continue to do them in other places, with other people… What we’re talking about at the end of it is: this is food, how do you feel about it?”
Meatable has a large tasting event coming up in February with investors, the board and meat companies that are interested in trying to figure out how to feed 10 billion people by 2050 with fewer resources at hand.
As for how much cultivated meat clients want to add to their product, Meatable leaves it up to them. The startup can show them different recipes, whether that’s a mix with pea or soy protein, or even a vegetable patty with butternut squash, carrots and mushrooms. “You can blend other things in here that have high nutritional value, no sugar added, all kinds of health benefits.”
“It’s really up to the business, meat company, grocery store, restaurant,” says Tripician. “So if you’re a meat company – Impossible, Cargill, JBS, whoever it is – and you go: ‘You run plants, you bring in livestock, you harvest, you fabricate, you turn it into food, put it in cold storage, put on a truck, you sell to restaurants and grocery stores.’
“All we’re going to do is say: ‘We’ll give you the technology, so you can have the equipment in your plant to make cultivated meat.’”
Tripician doesn’t want to change what meat producers do. “I’m not going to tell a $15B company how to make their product. I’m going to say: ‘I can get you raw material at a competitive price in 12 days, guaranteed, regardless of whether, regardless of feed prices, regardless of pandemics or diseases like avian or swine flu, regardless of all of that hailstorm, none of that matters.”
He continues: “When they go to their customers, they would be able to say: ‘Look, you seem like a progressive chef. You’ve got the younger people, they’re all on their iPhones… Do you think a product like this would make sense?’”
Meatable looks to collaborate with fellow cultivated meat producers
Courtesy: Meatable/Green Queen
One of the defining features of Meatable’s business is its production process, which was recently updated to halve the manufacturing time to just four days. This is made by its Opti-ox technology, which allows it to make products by isolating a single animal cell, without the need for fetal bovine serum.
The process uses pluripotent stem cells (PSCs), which – unlike immortalised cell lines that need to be altered to multiply indefinitely – have the natural ability to continue multiplying, and do so rapidly. This is coupled with a perfusion process that allows the startup to work in a continuous cycle to generate very high cell densities and produce fully differentiated muscle and fat cells faster than any competitor.
The company moved to its Leiden facility in November 2023, which houses 200-litre bioreactors (with the potential of expanding to 500 litres). It has also partnered with Singapore’s ESCO Aster, the world’s first approved contract manufacturing facility for cultivated meat, and plant protein manufacturer Love Handle.
But scaling up to meat industry levels is an immense challenge that has troubled even the most well-capitalised companies in the space. Tripician, for his part, doesn’t want to own a pilot plant. “We’re going to go to people that are our colleagues, and we’re going to say to them: ‘You figured this out. Why don’t we work together?’” he says.
Meatable is reaching out to cultivated meat pioneers in Australia, Europe, the UK and elsewhere to collaborate. “I want to use their pilot plant. I want to use the things they know, so that when we figure it out, we obviously benefit. And so do they. There’s more than enough demand for a bunch of us to be successful.
“Because – this isn’t going to shock anybody – what happens if, five years from now, the technology changes and the equipment’s different, you have to redo all the equipment. I don’t own any equipment. I don’t want to own any equipment.”
Cultivated meat ‘should not be at price parity’
Courtesy: Meatable
One key advantage of scaling up is that it will bring costs down, which is critical if cultivated meat is to reach the masses one day. The sector has managed to lower costs by 99% in the last decade, but McKinsey suggests it will take at least until 2030 for these proteins to reach price parity with meat.
Tripician, however, doesn’t believe cultivated meat should cost the same as its industrially farmed counterpart. “I think it should be a little bit of a premium,” he says. “As an industry steward, if it gets to parity, then farmers and ranchers are at risk, because it would be the same price, and I want them to be at a little bit lower, so that their businesses are always strong.”
He adds: “And if you’re going to ask a meat company to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in plants and facilities, they better make a little bit more money.”
But where does that leave the consumer? Tripician points out that between 6-23% of the dairy, produce, egg and bakery industries are made of premium-priced items. “These are 100-billion-dollar industries just in the US. If those can be that penetrated, then you would think the same premium on meat would be equally effective.”
He puts it in the same bracket as organic meat, which can be 70-75% higher than commodity meat. “It’s more, but it’s an amount people pay for,” he feels, forecasting such prices for cultivated meat in the next two to three years. “After that, it will come down more, a slow glide down.”
Targeting a Series C raise in the $30M ballpark
Courtesy: GFI
To date, Meatable has raised $95M from investors, and that’s excluding grants like the €7.6M pumped in by the Netherlands Enterprise Agency under its Innovation Credit programme last month. But the company is now working on a “modest” Series C raise, which would close at around the $350 mark (similar to its Series B round last year).
It’s part of the startup’s asset-light approach – it’s not building a plant, and it’s not competing with the rest of the industry in terms of production, distribution, sales, and the like. Lately, investors have cooled on cultivated meat – as they have on the wider food tech sector – though the downward spiral may be ending.
“They hate the asset-heavy thing,” Tripician says of venture capitalists. “They’ve lost a lot of money, or think they’re going to lose a lot of money in that. Because it’ll be very, very difficult for a pilot plant in cultivated meat to ever make money… We’re not pursuing that.
Meatable has enough runway for around 18 months, but the Series C would buy the company more time. “We’re fine, but I want to have more than fine, and I think that’s smart to say to an investor,” its CEO says.
“Look, if you believe we’re on the right path and the science and the IP and all that’s there, and our business model is going to be successful, can you invest an amount that will get us through this time?” he says when asked what his pitch to investors would be. “I know the meat companies will be buying licenses from us, building plants, and entering the marketplace over the next five years.”
He reveals that the business is doing a “soft launch” for existing investors, who might satisfy the capital requirements. But the round would be open from January 2025, with the aim of closing it by the end of spring.
Meatable expects regulatory approval in multiple countries next year
Courtesy: Meatable
Each of Meatable’s seven business hubs services the countries around it. For example, its Asian base is in Singapore, the first country to approve cultivated meat, and one that is currently evaluating Meatable’s application too.
“We’ve got meat companies there that know there’s regulatory approval, or there will be, within 12 to 18 months,” says Tripician. “That’s where it’s going to gain traction, and then we’ll follow.”
He adds: “I flew out and sat with the Singapore Food Agency. Their thinking – this is an American saying this – far exceeds ours as far as coordination between ministries of government, the Economic Development Board… and the private industry [goes]… Now, they also have a different background. We are not food insecure – they are. The US doesn’t have that pressure, and [Singapore] is a small country, but the coordination was truly impressive.
“They’re helping with staff. They’re helping open doors, and that’s the model. If countries go: ‘Our water is a problem, our soil is a problem’ – maybe it’s not food insecurity, you have other issues – then you should be facilitating solutions, not rejecting.”
Tripician reveals that Meatable is currently filing dossiers in six countries. “The Singapore regulatory approval process is largely welcomed. Several other countries out in Asia look to Singapore and say: ‘Well, we pretty much follow that.’ It’s not 100%, it’s not guaranteed, but it’s very alike,” he says.
“So we’re perfecting it with Singapore, and then we’re just taking it and saying to the other countries: ‘Here’s what we have. What do you need to see that’s a little different?’” he adds. “Some of them are saying nothing. Others are going: ‘Well, we could use a little more data here or a little more information there,’ and we go: ‘Absolutely.’”
Once the Singapore approval comes through – which Tripician expects by Q1 2025 (“we’re just a little short on the explanation, not the science” – Meatable will use that to get authorisation in a host of other countries. The UK’s Food Standards Agency has announced its intention to use a framework for international cooperation for novel food approvals too, a partnership likely to include Singapore.
“I see us moving with pretty good speed through 2025,” predicts Tripician. “At the end, I would be very disappointed in our team if we don’t have approval in five, six countries by this time or the end of next year.”
The EU is ‘leading with science, not a fear of change’
Courtesy: Meatable
What about things closer to home? So far, the EU has only received one application – from France’s Gourmey – thanks to the make-up of its existing novel food regulation. The complexity and timelines have led homegrown startups (like Meatable) to look internationally for launch plans.
“Countries and areas have their own hurdles, the things they care about, and it’s up to companies to navigate that. It’s not up to [EU members] to change their mind,” says Tripician. “We’ve been working with them in a way that we’re leading with science, not the fear of change.”
He believes the EU is taking a “very methodical” approach to the regulation of cultivated meat and other novel foods, and is now questioning the barriers it previously put up.
“If the product is safe, and you have bigger problems – climate change, feeding your people, soil, use of land – do you really want to use all of that land to raise feed? Or do you want to convert it to feeding people?,” asks Tripician. “Those are internal conversations, but they’ve been very supportive.”
Cultivated meat bans ‘anger’ Meatable CEO
Courtesy: Ron DeSantis/Twitter
As for Tripician’s own home country, a wave of states have been attempting to restrict this industry – Florida and Alabama have already banned cultivated meat”, with the former currently facing a lawsuit for the decision. “As an American, it angers me,” Tripician says.
“They don’t have a better idea, but they’re going to shut this down,” he adds. State politicians are suggesting that cultivated meat could be bad for farmers and ranchers. “That’s just un-American. We’re supposed to pick what we want, as long as it’s safe, not supposed to have someone tell us what to do.”
He appeals to state governors, calling them “smart people” who are “trying to do the right thing”. “I would ask them the same question we started with: if you don’t like cultivated meat for whatever reason – probably political, because farmers and ranchers vote – what’s your answer for five, 10, 15, 20, 25 years from now?” he wonders.
“We already have 10% of the global population going to bed hungry every single night. What’s that number going to be? Is it going to be your kids, your grandkids, your nephews, your nieces, your neighbours? What’s your answer?”
He adds: “I think if you’re not part of the solution, my god, please don’t be part of the problem. Just get out of the way. Let the FDA and USDA do their job. They’re really good at it. If it’s a problem, they’ll stop it.”
Drawing on his experience as a “meat guy”, he believes that farmers won’t be hurt by the success of cultivated meat as an industry. “Farmers and ranchers are the best stewards of the land. Nobody cares more about the quality of the land than them and the livestock they treat with respect. They don’t want to do anything bad to them, but if they’re running out of meat, then everyone’s going to push them for more,” he says.
Cultivated meat can take some of that pressure off. The livestock farmers and producers wouldn’t be impacted negatively if cultivated meat grew at a reasonable rate – one that they decide, based on how much they want to include in their formulations.
“The meat companies then could say: ‘Now I have enough meat, I can feed the people, and that meat doesn’t destroy soil, water or air. It doesn’t do the harm,’” says Tripician. “How does that puzzle not fit together?”
In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers a new oat milk dessert brand, Next Level Burger’s holiday feast, and price parity for plant-based milk.
New products and launches
Discount retailer Aldi has introduced its largest vegan Christmas range in the UK, including a plant-based version of its footlong pig in blanket, a sprouted gratin, a nut roast, a brie and butternut wellington, and a dairy-free cheese board.
Courtesy: Aldi UK
Fish-free seafood maker Aqua Cultured Foods has landed on the menu of Chicago eatery Mama Delia, owned by Michelin-starred chef Marcos Campos Sanchez. The dish, called Atún Crudo, features the vegan raw tuna topped with a fried egg and potato strings.
If you’re after oat milk desserts, Kaiser is a new brand by Canadian oat farmer Nathan Kaiser. The company has introduced a bunch of ice cream tubs and bars, all but one of which are vegan. They’re available at select grocers in Quebec and will enter the Greater Toronto Area later this year, before a national rollout in 2025.
Courtesy: Kaiser
Oatly has signed a multi-year deal with UK café chain Black Sheep Coffee, which will serve its barista oat milk as the default dairy alternative across its 100 stores.
Mushroom meat maker Myco has struck a deal with Brakes, the UK’s largest wholesaler, to supply burgers, sausages and mince – made from vertically farmed oyster mushrooms – to the latter’s 20,000+ clients.
Courtesy: Myco
And vegan fast-casual chain Next Level Burger and its subsidiary Veggie Grill have introduced a take-home Holiday Feast menu, which features its Holiday Harvest wellington and five sides. Each $130 set feeds four to six people and requires a 72-hour notice, with the option to add dessert.
Company and financial updates
Swiss cultivated meat startup Sallea, which has created edible scaffolds for manufacturers to produce whole-cut meat and seafood from animal cells, has raised $2.6M in a funding round led by Founderful.
Courtesy: Sallea
London-based New Wave Biotech has won the €20,000 EIT Food Accelerator Network Tech Validation Award to validate its technology with research organisation CPI. It has created an AI-powered software to help precision fermentation companies optimise their downstream processing.
Fellow UK company Vegan Food Group has sold the Weisbaum production facility it acquired in the takeover of Tofutown earlier this year to another German tofu producer, New Originals Company. It will allow the firm to focus on scaling up at its larger plant in Lüneburg.
Courtesy: Vegan Food Group
At British meat-free brand Gosh Foods, sales decreased by 7% in 2023, mostly from declines in Europe, with pre-tax losses widening from £1.3M to £3M.
Meanwhile, Framptons, another UK plant-based company, has reported a profit of £1M for the financial year ending April 2024, overturning a £3.7M loss from the previous year. It comes after its acquisition by German investment firm Profura. The manufacturer launched the Wessex Oat Company in July.
Courtesy: Framptons
Dutch crop solutions provider AgroSpheres has closed a $37M Series B round to scale up its AgriCell technology, which protects active ingredients in pesticides from environmental pressures, and bring its biopesticides to market.
Also in the Netherlands, Qorium, led by Mosa Meat founder and cultivated meat pioneer Mark Post, has produced a 35x35cm sample of cultivated leather using a newly scaled-up tissue bioreactor.
Courtesy: Qorium
Massachusetts continues to invest in the future of food, awarding $2.1M to the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture to establish the Foodtech Engineering for Alternative Sustainable Technologies (FEAST) centre, which will advance cultivated meat R&D.
Agricultural giant Royal Cosun has invested $3.5M in Planetary to scale up the development of cost-effective ingredients derived from fermentation, convert the former’s feedstock into mycoprotein ingredients, and create new applications for plant-based food.
Policy, research and awards
The Vegan Society’s VEG 1 Baby & Toddler supplement, a liquid multivitamin for children aged six months to four years, has won a three-star rating in the supplement category of the 2024 Nourish Awards.
Courtesy: The Vegan Society
In the Netherlands, plant-based milk is almost at price parity at Lidl (where dairy is only six cents cheaper) and Aldi (a 16-cent difference), according to research by animal rights organisation Wakker Dier.
Japanese researchers have conducted a life-cycle assessment of IntegriCulture’s serum-free, food-grade culture media for cultivated meat, revealing that electricity, animal inputs and single-use items like “lab consumables” were the main emissions hotspots.
Courtesy: Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
Finally, is our brain chemistry to blame for the climate crisis? That’s the perspective of a new white paper, which suggests that humans are hardwired to desire status (which translates to material wealth and consumption), and dopamine continually craves greater rewards.
Californian startups Friends & Family Pet Food Company and Novel Farms are co-developing cultivated meat for pets, and are already engaging with regulators.
Friends & Family Pet Food Company, the newly launched startup focused on alternative pet food, has announced a second collaboration to produce cultivated meat for cats and dogs.
The Berkeley startup is collaborating with Oakland-based cultivated meat producer Novel Farms, which has a range of cell lines to make products like quail, chicken, pork and mouse meat. It complements Friends & Family’s partnership with Singapore’s Umami Bioworks to create cultivated seafood for cats, which was announced in July.
Friends & Family and Novel Foods are in the testing and prototyping stages right now to determine which meats they want to focus on, but have earmarked a 2025 launch for the product line, co-founder and CEO Joshua Errett tells Green Queen.
The target market is the San Francisco Bay Area, and to reach these consumers and their pets, Friends & Family has begun engaging with the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM), which regulates animal feed ingredients and pet food in the US.
“Just like all food, pet food is a meat-focused industry that could use some innovation,” says Errett. “Our collaboration-heavy, asset-light approach has the potential to change pet food forever.”
He adds: “Novel Farms is a great partner for us as they check all the boxes. We will work together to make customised pet nutrition for cats and dogs.”
A business model built on tech and collaboration
Friends & Family CEO Joshua Errett with Novel Farms CEO Michelle Lu | Courtesy: Friends & Family Pet Food Company
Errett, who has years of experience in cultivated meat and alternative pet food, established the startup last year with pet industry veteran and COO Jonny Cruz, and veterinarian and chief science officer Sarah Dodd.
The company has developed a proprietary pet food platform with freeze-drying technology to help cultivated meat producers get to market. “Our model is to partner with talented scientists, research facilities and bioscience companies that are creating cultivated ingredients,” explains Errett.
“We especially look for ingredients that are sought-after by pet food consumers. The ingredients and technology also have to be scalable – we want to build an iconic pet brand, and to do that, we need commercial-scale ingredients. And we create a path to market for these ingredients.”
The partnership with Novel Farms is the second among several others in the works, and will see its cultivated animal ingredients be incorporated into Friends & Family’s “shelf-ready foods” for dogs and cats.
“My vision is that Friends & Family is the masterbrand, and each product line we create will have its own branded identity,” outlines Errett. “Think of it like a house-of-brands strategy. This will allow us to showcase these amazing ingredients individually, and tailor each ingredient for a specific category of pet food.”
He adds: “For instance, we can make food for puppies, and cultivate the meat in that product line to have higher calcium, more protein, more phosphorus and other nutrients that puppies need.”
Michelle Lu, founder and CEO of Novel Farms, says: “Cultivated pet food makes perfect sense as an entry point for getting cultivated products to market. As Novel Farms prepares for our own market entry in the next year, pet food is a high-impact strategic target for us.”
Cultivated meat firms must make consumers the focal point
A prototype of the cultivated fish treats being developed by Friends & Family and Umami Bioworks | Courtesy: Friends & Family Pet Food Co.
Errett says Friends & Family’s pet food platform can help extend the ingredient, lower the cost and enhance the nutrition of the final product: “Part of our mission is to bring cultivated meat and fish to the consumer; to prove there’s demand. We can only do that if the cost is reasonable to the average pet food consumer.”
The resulting pet food will likely not be 100% cultivated meat – instead, it would be mixed with plant-based ingredients to create hybrid meat, which is the path most cultivated meat producers for humans have also taken. “We’ll aim for the highest inclusion rate we can,” says Errett.
He previously revealed that the cultivated seafood being developed with Umami Bioworks will have up to 10% fish cells upon launch, with an aim to get to 25-30% eventually. Asked how that partnership is going, Errett praised Umami Bioworks’s team as “true visionaries in not only cultivated technology, but in food”. “Things are moving along with that partnership,” he says, hinting at an update soon.
Umami Bioworks has also been in touch with the CVM with Friends & Family Pet Food, with the startups previously indicating a launch for Q1 2025.
Friends & Family is the applicant for the pet food being created with Novel Farms. “Each time we go through the regulatory process, our next application becomes stronger,” says Errett. “That’s stronger in terms of what data we need, but also the relationship we’re building with our contacts at the CVM.”
While politicians in several US states are attempting to restrict cultivated meat – Florida and Alabama have already banned it – the USDA and the FDA have both found these products to be safe, leading to the launch of Upside Foods‘s and Good Meat‘s chicken products. But consumers (and investors) remain on the fence: a global survey found that a third of pet owners are willing to try cultivated meat themselves, but nearly half would feed it to their furry friends.
“Cultivated meat and seafood companies will only be successful if they can create products that consumers love. Not simply one-to-one replacements for what’s currently out there, but products that provide true value to the end customer,” says Errett.
“I believe this is something every cultivated meat and seafood company needs to think about – even if you are B2B, somewhere along the line there will always be a C: the consumer. And you have to understand what that consumer wants. That’s why we are working closely with all our bioscience partners, to customise cultivated meat and seafood nutrition to bring the most value possible to pets.”
French cultivated chicken startup Vital Meat showcased its ingredient in a public tasting in Singapore, where it expects regulatory approval “very soon”.
With a market launch on the horizon, Vital Meat organised a cultivated meat event in a Singapore restaurant to give consumers a taste of its future-friendly ingredient.
The Nantes-based startup teamed up with Hue, a modern Thai eatery owned by chef Neo Jun Hao, for the tasting, which featured three dishes championing Singaporean culture.
“Hue will be one of our launch partners, and we’re currently in discussions with several other restaurants and food players,” Vital Meat CEO Etienne Duthoit told Green Queen.
It marks the “first step” towards the company’s commercial launch, having filed a regulatory dossier to the Singapore Food Agency in November 2023. “The regulatory process in Singapore has been moving smoothly, and we’re confident in its progress,” Duthoit noted. “We remain hopeful for approval by the end of the year.”
The company’s regulatory expert Claude Rescan added: “We are going through the questions and answers process with scientific experts from SFA and so far, the discussion is very smooth and is going well.”
Cultivated chicken dishes impress diners
Courtesy: Vital Meat
Vital Meat uses pharmaceutical technology to turn cells from fertilised chicken eggs into a cultivated meat ingredient, which it will supply to manufacturers and restaurants to combine with plant-based ingredients for hybrid meat.
For the tasting at Hue, Jun Hao curated three dishes to celebrate local flavours and palates. Diners were treated to cultivated chicken skin chips, a golden, crispy snack; handmade ravioli filled with Vital Meat chicken and Singaporean spices, served in a cultivated chicken broth; and cultivated chicken rice, a national favourite.
“Our ingredient comes in the form of a paste that can be used as it is or processed according to the final recipe,” Vital Meat CEO Etienne Duthoit told Green Queen. “For example, chef Jun Hao, who developed the recipes for our tasting event, prepared a powder from our product and used it to reinforce his broth”He also prepared a batter to create the famous chicken skin.”
He added: “Chef Jun Hao enjoyed working with our product due to its amazing taste and versatility which allows it to be processed in a variety of ways to suit different recipes.”
The ingredient was blended with standard ingredients in each dish. “In the espuma dish, it was mixed with potato and milk, while for the chicken rice, it was combined with rice, garlic, ginger, salt, sesame oil and other spices essential to Singaporean cuisine,” said Duthoit.
“Our ingredient stands on its own in terms of nutrition and taste, without the need for additives or flavour enhancers. Fun fact: Some guests thought flavouring was added to Chef Jun Hao’s broth – they couldn’t believe our product had such a true-to-nature chicken taste.”
The event convened investors, industry stakeholders, government officials from Singapore, and representatives from France, who were given leaflets describing the story behind the collaboration.
Calisa Lim, senior project manager at the APAC Society for Cellular Agriculture, wrote: “The cultivated chicken powder was mixed with flour and pan-fried into a crispy, crunchy chicken skin (very, very yummy and you can’t go wrong with fried chicken), the brown stock seasoned with cultivated chicken powder made a good umami chicken soup with a hint of sweetness (feels just like a warm embrace), and a classic chicken rice featuring plant-based meat slices that soaked up all the chickeny goodness.”
Vital Meat goes for ‘accessible’ over ‘upscale’
Vital Meat’s decision to host the tasting at Hue – a welcoming, accessible establishment – instead of a high-end, Michelin-starred eatery, as has been the case with most cultivated meat tasting menus globally, was a deliberate decision.
“We deeply appreciate Chef Jun Hao’s talent and innovative approach to cuisine, which aligns with our vision for cultivated meat. As a promising young chef, he represents the new generation of consumers who are aware of the changing food landscap – whether for environmental, animal welfare or health reasons – and the growing range of alternatives available to them,” said Duthoit.
“Holding the tasting at Hue also reflects our commitment to making cultivated meat accessible to everyone, not just for ultra-premium dining experiences. By partnering with Hue, we’re showing that our product is intended to be part of everyday meals.”
This is also why it’s relying on the hybrid approach, helping it bring down costs. The powdered format also allows chefs and manufacturers to easily incorporate the chicken into different recipes.
“We are steadily closing the gap with traditional meat. To lower the cost of our cultivated chicken, large-scale production is essential. And achieving that requires consumer interest and feedback. So we (and our clients too) are taking things step by step,” he said. “A first touch base with consumers and the market will help us refine the product and the needed communication to meet market demand.”
Vital Meat is working with cell culture media producer BioWest, whose customised serum-free media enables the startup to manufacture its cultivated chicken in 250-litre bioreactors, each capable of producing several kgs of product at a time.
Moreover, it has a pilot facility near Nantes, where it runs 2,000-litre bioreactors on a daily basis. “With each production, we are seeing significant cost improvements. It is very encouraging,” Camille Chevalier, communications manager at Vital Meat, told Green Queen in May. “We are confident to get to price parity in a few years.”
The startup has partnered with food companies in anticipation of its regulatory approval in Singapore, which was the first country to allow the sale of cultivated meat. It’s also the only nation where you can currently buy or experience these foods, whether it’s Good Meat’s chicken in retail or Vow‘s cultivated quail in restaurants.
Aside from Singapore, Vital Meat has also applied for approval in the UK, where the regulatory framework around novel foods is being overhauled to speed up authorisations and help companies get to market faster. “We can’t wait to start commercialisation in Great Britain; chicken is one of the most consumed meat over there,” Duthoit said in May. “We are now preparing our launch in 2025 and looking for food partners.”
In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Vital Meat’s cultivated chicken tasting in Singapore, Oatly’s new marketing campaign, and layoffs at The Every Company.
New products and launches
As it awaits regulatory approval in Singapore, French cultivated meat producer Vital Meatcollaborated with Hue Restaurant as part of a tasting in the city-state. The event featured three dishes using the startup’s cultivated chicken powder.
Courtesy: Carisa Lim/LinkedIn
There’s a new mushroom brand in town. California’s Thallus Foods is using the chicken of the woods mushroom to replace, well, the other chicken. It calls itself the first indoor cultivator of this fungi variety.
Speaking of new companies, in Denmark, Plantbox is curating plant-based meats and cheeses for wholesale consumers, and has gained listings at SPAR, Pico Pizza, Nemlig, Wolt, and more.
Courtesy: Oatly
Swedish oat milk giant Oatly has kicked off its new It Works in Tea campaign to target Britain’s tea-drinking tendencies. Featuring billboards in London, Manchester, and Brighton, the brand asked consumers to text a WhatsApp number if they were unconvinced. It received over 12,000 responses in the first 24 hours, who were in with a chance of winning a free tea set (with a mug and PG Tips tea).
London-based The Good Pea Co, which makes alt-milk powders, has rebranded to Kwerky, with a new five-ingredient oat and pea milk powder slated for launch next month.
Also in the UK, Tiba Tempeh has gained a listing for its tempeh block and mince at 327 Morrisons store, following a rollout in Sainsbury’s in the summer.
In more tempeh news, Mamame Foods has introduced tempeh chips made from black-eyed peas in original, hot chilli, sea salt and rosemary flavours. They’re available at Whole Foods in the UK and will come to Planet Organic this month for £4.99, alongside Erewhon and Sprouts in the US in the coming weeks.
Courtesy: Mamame Foods
Discount retailer Asda has added Dark Choc & Honeycomb Cake Pop Bites to its private-label Free From range in the UK.
Belgian bakery and chocolate giant Puratos has extended its ready-to-whip Ambiante line with a dairy-free chocolate flavour, which uses cocoa from the company’s Cacao-Trace programme and can be used as a topping or filling for cakes, pastries, and more.
Courtesy: Puratos
Swedish startup Hooked Foods has teamed up with Sodexo to distribute its seafood and chicken analogues to the caterer’s network, following a successful Green Lunch for one of its clients.
Vegan frozen food company Strong Roots has launched Air Bites, a range of products designed specifically for air fryers. It is available in Crispy Spinach & Carrot, Crispy Pea & Lemon and Crispy Veg flavour for £2.95.
Courtesy: Oatrageous/Misunderstood Whiskey
And back in the US, Misunderstood Whiskey has unveiled its Outrageous brand of cream liqueurs made from oat milk. The 14% ABV bottles come in espresso, coconut and bourbon cream flavours for $28.
Company and finance updates
US biotech startup Tiamat Sciences, which created animal-free growth factors for cultivated meat via molecular farming, has ceased operations following financial constraints.
Californian firm The Every Company, the precision fermentation startup making recombinant egg proteins, has conducted layoffs at its Daly City headquarters.
Courtesy: NotCo
Chilean food tech startup NotCo, whose products are built on its AI platform Guiseppe, has developed a generative AI model to create new flavour and fragrance formulations.
Two years after the initiative’s launch, Ferments du Futur has opened an innovation centre in the Paris-Saclay science and innovation cluster. The public-private scheme is an accelerator for fermentation startups.
Spanish vegan egg maker Uobo has secured a six-figure sum in its latest funding round, and partnered with fellow Catalan startup Cubiq Foods – which makes animal-free functional fats – to develop a new egg alternative for B2B clients.
Courtesy: Uobo
In Japan, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has issued several grants under the Small/Startup Business Innovation Research Program. Alternative protein startups include Agro Ludens ($7.1M), Deats Food Planning ($4.5M), and Fermenstation ($3.4M).
ProVeg South Africa has been working with the Western Cape government to raise awareness about food insecurity during the National Nutrition Week (October 9 to 15), distributing 2,000 educational booklet to youngsters, hosting events for locals, and handing out 2,500 vegan nuggets from Fry Family Food in Uniondale.
Courtesy: Redefine Meat
Israeli 3D-printed meat maker Redefine Meat has won plaudits from Dutch chefs after hosting them at its new visitor centre in the production facility in Best, with the startup’s R&D team taking in the feedback to improve upon its New-Meat range.
US biotech manufacturing firm Liberation Labs, which specialises in precision fermentation, has received a further $12M from cellular agriculture investor Agronomics. It brings its total equity-linked funding to $35.5M, which will be joined by its upcoming Series A round.
Policy, events and awards
The APAC Society of Cellular Agriculture has signed an MoU with Temasek Polytechnic to create its first student chapter, which will foster a community of students across Asia-Pacific looking to shape the future of food through cultivated meat and seafood.
Courtesy: Float
FoodBev Media has announced the winners of its 2024 World Plant-Based Innovation Awards, which include Float‘s adaptogenic oat milk, Elmhurst 1925‘s sour cream, Arla‘s JÖRÐ barista oat milk, The Mushroom Meat Co, and LOVO chocolate.
Speaking of awards, Australian cultivated meat startup Vow, which has been selling its cultivated quail since receiving clearance in Singapore this April, has won the Future Ready Award in the Australian Financial Review‘s 2024 BOSS Most Innovative Companies category.
Courtesy: Vow
Finally, also in Australia, Sydney will host the next edition of the AltProteins Conference in October 2025, following a three-year stint in Melbourne.
A federal judge has refused Upside Foods’s request for a preliminary injunction in its lawsuit against Florida’s ban on cultivated meat, throwing its Art Basel plans into doubt.
Upside Foods has had its request to halt the enforcement of Florida’s cultivated meat ban denied by a federal judge.
In a 21-page ruling last Friday, Chief US District Judge Mark Walker rejected the Californian food tech startup’s motion for a preliminary injunction, which would have allowed it to showcase its cultivated chicken at the Art Basel festival in Miami (December 6-8).
Florida was the first US state to ban cultivated meat, making it a second-degree misdemeanour to manufacture, sell or distribute these proteins. After being signed by Governor Ron DeSantis in May, the law came into effect on July 1.
A month later, however, Upside Foods – one of only two companies approved to sell cultivated meat by the US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration – filed a legal complaint against the state, calling the move “unconstitutional”.
The Institute for Justice, which is leading the case on behalf of Upside Foods, sought a preliminary injunction to halt the ban until a decision on the lawsuit is made, allowing the company to sell its products and honour its event commitments. It had teamed up with local chefs for the Art Basel fair, and is set to host a tasting at the South Beach Wine and Food Festival in the state capital next February.
But after a hearing last Monday, Walker has denied the preliminary injunction. However, this does not spell the end of the lawsuit.
Upside Foods ‘could identify no regulation’ to support specific arguments
Courtesy: Upside Foods
Upside Foods argued that the federal Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA) – which requires the USDA and FDA to inspect all poultry products, which apply to sales in states too – preempts Florida from prohibiting the sale of cultivated meat.
“Essentially, the federal government has said that cultivated chicken cells produced at Upside’s facilities can be used in poultry products, and the state of Florida is saying that they can’t. The state simply doesn’t have that power,” Paul Sherman, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, said at the time.
The state argued that cultivated chicken does not fall into the definition of a poultry product, but Walker noted that Upside Foods “has the better of the arguments” here, acknowledging that Upside Foods’s product comes directly from chicken cells.
However, while the company argued that Florida’s ban imposes ingredient and manufacturing requirements inconsistent with the PPIA, the judge said the plaintiff could not identify a law or regulation “creates a federal ‘ingredient requirement’ with respect to ‘cultivated meat’”.
Moreover, since Upside Foods does not manufacture its cultivated chicken in Florida, the ban on manufacturing doesn’t impact its operations or facilities. “Florida has not sought to reach into Plaintiff’s facilities to tell them how they should handle their cultivated chicken cells throughout the production process and then reframed such regulations as a sales ban,” he wrote.
“Just because Plaintiff’s product arguably falls within the scope of the PPIA, and thus, is under the USDA’s regulatory authority, this does not mean that a state is expressly preempted from banning the sale of that particular kind of poultry product,” Walker stated.
Lawyers to appeal decision as judge recognises ban’s effect on Upside Foods
Courtesy: Kevin Martin Galante/Upside Foods
While the preliminary injunction has been denied, the lawsuit continues. “Preliminary injunctions are just that: preliminary,” said Sherman. “The real fight is still ahead, and today’s ruling has no bearing on the final resolution of this case. We always expected the bulk of the lawsuit to be decided on its merits, and that’s exactly where we’re headed.”
The judge’s ruling revealed a number of partnerships Upside Foods had struck to sell cultivated meat in Florida before the ban was imposed. The company had already sold its cultivated chicken to at least one restaurant in Miami, and the chef it had teamed up with for Art Basel was also planning to offer the cultivated chicken at her restaurant on a limited basis by the first quarter of 2025.
Upside Foods had further identified chefs in Miami and Tallahassee for similar partnerships, but halted talks after the ban came into place.
“Defendants’ suggestion that Plaintiff’s evidence must establish something more than past sales or distribution, halted plans to work with Florida chefs, and future intentions to resume efforts to partner with Florida chefs and other businesses would effectively require Plaintiff to submit an admission concerning the commission of a crime under Florida law,” wrote Walker, noting that Upside Foods did not need to incriminate itself “just to get through the courthouse door”.
In recognising Upside Foods’s standing to seek a preliminary injunction, he stated that the “evidence demonstrates that it faces a real and immediate threat of criminal enforcement against it if it continues to attempt to sell or distribute its cultivated chicken in Florida”.
Suranjan Sen, an attorney at the Institute of Justice, called the denial of the preliminary junction merely a “procedural step”. “We are looking forward to appealing this preliminary decision while the case goes forward,” he said. “We are confident that the courts will ultimately recognise that Florida cannot ban products simply to protect local industries from honest competition.”
Florida isn’t the only state to have banned cultivated meat – a similar law took effect in Alabama at the start of this month. And lawmakers in Arizona, Illinois, Kentucky, Nebraska, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia have introduced similar measures.
New analysis lays out the widespread benefits of cultivated meat to the EU and the environment, but not without significant support from parliamentarians.
In late July, French startup Gourmey announced it had officially filed an application to sell cultivated meat in the EU.
It was a seminal moment – not merely because a company made a regulatory filing, but because it was the first to do so under the EU’s novel food regulations.
Among the strictest in the world, the complexity of a 27-member block combined with a long-drawn process drove companies away from the region – instead, they focused their efforts on countries where such frameworks have progressed, like Singapore, the US, Israel and the UK, a former EU member.
But there have been movements. The EU recently updated its novel food framework to account for the advancements in the food tech sector, providing more detailed guidance to companies hoping to file applications, especially on scientific requirements.
Now, a new report shows why it is wise for the EU to do so. By helping develop a robust ecosystem, cultivated meat could deliver €20-85B in annual economic contributions, making up around 0.4% of its GDP. Nearly a third of this would come directly from the cultivated meat sector, while the rest would be sourced from suppliers and induced spending and economy.
By 2050, the cultivated meat market could be worth a combined €15-80B in new domestic and export markets across the value chain by 2050, while generating up to €40B in trade opportunities, largely driven by the EU’s leadership in specialised cell culture inputs.
Moreover, the sector would lead to 25,000 to 90,000 new highly skilled jobs directly from production, with estimates suggesting that for every job created in cultivated meat, another job would be created elsewhere.
The analysis, carried out by systems change advisory Systemiq in partnership with cultivated meat think tank the Good Food Institute Europe, also revealed the outsized climate benefits cultivated meat would bring to the planet. But public support – in the form of money and policy – is critical.
Price parity crucial to the future of cultivated meat
Courtesy: Mosa Meat
Europeans currently consume up to eight times more meat than is recommended in the Eat-Lancet Planetary Health Diet, and this appetite for meat is set to grow by 10% by 2050. That is unsustainable because our food system is virtually already running at full capacity.
Livestock production takes up 71% of the EU’s agricultural land and contributes to 84% of its food system emissions, but food products derived from animals provide only 35% of calories and 65% of proteins in the region.
Alternative proteins are a “critical lever” to stay within the safe operating limits of our planetary boundaries, offering us a chance to use less land, water and energy to make more food, while generating far fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Business as usual won’t cut it. The Systemiq report looks at three ways things could pan out for cultivated meat, and the future of the EU’s food supply. The first is a scenario of low-ambition scenario, where cultivated meat would become a niche ingredient with products mostly comprised of plant-based ingredients and a small percentage of cultivated animal cells.
Here, wider regulatory approvals still remain five years away, which further slow down R&D and scale-up efforts, as well as cost reductions, meaning price parity will likely not be a reality until 2045. The high markup of cultivated meat would mean it would only make up 0.5% of the meat market by mid-century.
In the medium-ambition scenario, these products gain momentum alongside the broader bioeconomy, with price parity met in 2040 through the commodification of key input supply chains. Regulatory approvals on a wide scale could occur by the end of this decade, and cultivated meat could capture 3% of the meat market.
Finally, the high-ambition scenario would see cultivated meat become a part of mass-market diets across the world, with regulatory approvals taking place efficiently across regions. It could compete with meat on costs by 2035, allowing producers to include it in higher proportions in products. These advancements would see cultivated meat take up nearly a tenth of the meat industry’s share.
The projections mirror another report that looks at alternative protein’s potential in the EU based on different levels of intervention. Systemiq suggests that the global cultivated meat market could reach €500B by 2050, with Asia dominating consumption (65%). The EU would likely account for 6% of this share.
But to get there, cultivated meat producers need to build on the work they have done in the last decade and drastically reduce prices, by over €10 per kg to reach parity with meat. There are multiple developments that can facilitate this, including increased media use efficiency, new plant-based and fermentation-derived cell culture sources, reduced labour intensity (but with improved pay and quality), meeting energy requirements with renewables, and advancements in scaffold materials.
EU urged to spend €500M every year on cultivated meat
Courtesy: Romain Buisson/Gourmey
The opportunities for the EU, as outlined above, are multifaceted and widespread. The region could meet 70% of its own demand for cultivated meat, with the domestic market potentially reaching €38B by 2050.
Then there are the planetary advantages. By unlocking wider adoption of cultivated meat – and thus plant-based products too – the EU could avoid 3.5 gigatonnes of emissions by 2050, equivalent to a sixth of its agricultural footprint by that time. It would also reduce land use by up to a third, and water consumption by as much as 7%.
Additionally, there’s potential for valorising waste products as bioeconomy inputs – for example, poly-lactic acid from culture media can be used to produce bioplastics. There are advantages for the pharma and life sciences sectors too, in that cheaper culture media would reduce overall production costs and growth factors could be utilised in therapeutic applications.
The EU’s farmers won’t be left behind – cultivated meat relies on key farmed crops for growth media, but farmers can also supply animal cells and byproducts to companies, and may be able to produce cultivated meat on-site on a small scale.
Speaking of farmers, more than 80% of the EU’s public subsidies under its Common Agriculture Policy have gone to livestock producers, with 44% directly contributing to animal feed, according to one study. Separate research suggests that the EU has spent 1,200 times more money on supporting animal agriculture than alternative proteins like cultivated meat and plant-based foods.
That needs to change. The cultivated meat sector needs €5B in annual spending in the EU, and €500M of this should come from public sources, aimed at R&D and derisking large-scale infrastructure builds. Globally, the industry needs up to €55B from both the private and public sectors.
There are multiple models governments to pitch in: research grants, tax credits, R&D subsidies, offtake agreements, blended finance, and public-private partnerships.
The EU, meanwhile, needs to make the regulatory process more collaborative and transparent, with significantly more policy support needed for cultivated meat. Finally, there’s a need for commonly accepted product names and greater awareness of cultivated meat’s benefits, alongside better-tasting and more inexpensive products, to breed consumer acceptance of these foods.
Singaporean cultivated seafood producer Umami Bioworks has expanded operations to the UK, and is in talks with the country’s regulator as it maps a path to market.
Umami Bioworks’s international expansion rages on, with the cultivated seafood startup now setting up operations in the UK, the land of fish and chips (and overfishing).
The UK is the latest in a growing list of countries on Umami Bioworks’s radar, which include South Korea, India, Malaysia, the US, and Singapore. “Over the past year, we’ve been evaluating a variety of strategies to bring our platform to the European market to address the growing challenges with seafood supply shortages and rising costs,” Umami Bioworks founder and CEO Mihir Pershad tells Green Queen.
It comes just a day after the UK government invested £1.6M for the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to fast-track testing and regulatory approval of cultivated meat, and three months after it became the first European country to greenlight such a product for sale (albeit for pet food).
“We’ve been in contact with the regulators at the FSA, exploring the path to commercialisation in the UK market,” reveals Pershad. “We’re excited to be moving forward in the UK market after assessing the market needs and multiple conversations with regulators and potential partners.”
Those partners include institutes like University College London and Imperial College, which is also the site of one of Bezos Earth Fund‘s Centres for Sustainable Protein. “In general, we work with university collaborators on frontier projects to help unlock new innovations cultivated solutions more scalable and more affordable,” says Pershad.
“Our collaborations span a wide range of activities, from establishing new species for cell cultivation to the development of novel machine learning solutions that enhance the speed of development and scalability.”
Battling the UK’s big overfishing problem
Courtesy: Umami Bioworks
The company’s model in the UK mirrors its scale-up approach globally. “We intend to partner with an established food company to establish domestic production built upon Umami’s technology platform, producing seafood that meats UK consumer tastes and desires,” explains Pershad.
While the production capacity hasn’t been determined yet, he adds: “We see Umami’s role in the ecosystem to primarily be commercialising and scaling near-term cultivated solutions, but we also see tremendous value in seeding the future of the industry in partnership with academic collaborators.”
Umami Bioworks, which merged with fellow Singaporean cultivated seafood firm Shiok Meats in March, is among a number of startups using cellular agriculture to tackle the global overfishing crisis. Nearly 90% of the world’s fish stocks are now 80% of the planet’s fisheries have been fully exploited, over-exploited or depleted, according to the UN FAO.
One study suggests that we could be heading towards a complete collapse of ocean life by 2048, driven primarily by overfishing for human consumption, as well as marine pollution and climate change.
Looking locally, over a third of UK fish populations are being overfished, and a quarter have been depleted to critically low population sizes, marine protection organisation Oceana UK found. The government’s own scientists have said that 54% of the country’s catch limits set by lawmakers are at unsustainably high levels.
The UK relies heavily on 10 key fishing stocks, five of which are either being overfished or reaching critically endangered population levels. Of these 10 stocks, six are whitefish, the same type Umami Bioworks is first focusing on for its UK plans.
“We will be bringing production technology and capability for both premium seafood and companion animal products to the UK, and will determine the order of launch for various products in collaboration with our local partners,” says Pershad.
Umami Bioworks praises UK government’s effort to advance cultivated meat
Courtesy: Umami Bioworks
Britain’s appetite for cultivated meat may not be huge – a government-backed survey suggested that only a third would be open to trying these proteins – but it is certainly growing. YouGov polling shows that the number of Brits who would give cultivated meat a go has grown from 19% in 2012 to 26% now.
This is likely aided by the growing awareness about cultivated meat – nearly three-quarters (74%) of UK residents have heard about these foods. But while they generally consider them to be better for animal welfare and planetary health, concerns around taste and price remain.
Additionally, more people feel cultivated meat (27%) is less safe to eat than those who think it’s better (16%), although a third (33%) are unsure about the food safety aspect. It highlights a critical gap in consumer education and communication for the industry.
This will be remedied in part by the government’s aforementioned efforts to create a regulatory ‘sandbox’, which would provide application support to cultivated meat startups, speed up regulatory approval timelines, and expand the safety and nutritional knowledge of novel foods, all while maintaining the FSA’s safety standards.
“Ensuring consumers can trust the safety of new foods is one of our most crucial responsibilities,” said Prof Robin May, chief scientific advisor to the FSA. He added that the initiative “will enable safe innovation and allow us to keep pace with new technologies being used by the food industry to ultimately provide consumers with a wider choice of safe foods”.
Pershad says Umami Bioworks is “delighted” to see the FSA’s ambitions of creating a sandbox be realised: “We are strong proponents of sandbox approaches because we believe they enable companies and regulators to learn together and to share openly in a way that builds more robust and tailored regulatory frameworks when new technical approaches are involved.”
So where next for the company? It’s setting up production lines in Malaysia and South Korea, collaborating with research initiatives in India, and working with a pet food company to bring cultivated fish treats for cats to the US market next year. “We are in active review with documents submitted to regulators in major markets across America, Europe, and Asia,” Pershad told Green Queen last week.
“Of course, the EU is a significant seafood market and one that we are assessing closely,” he says now. The EU’s novel food regulation (which the UK is now moving away from, nearly five years after Brexit) has long been a major barrier for startups in the space. So far, only France’s Gourmey has filed for approval. “We don’t yet have a timeline or firm plans to announce for regulatory submission or market entry into the EU, but we expect to solidify those plans this quarter.”
Devising a national action strategy for alternative proteins is crucial for countries’ climate targets and global food security – a new report shows how.
In the next 25 years, the world will need 56% more food to feed its expanding population. But it has never faced a worse threat to food security than it does now, with current dietary patterns wreaking havoc on the planet, and climate change returning the favour in the worst possible ways.
Extreme weather events are decimating crop health, at a time when one in 10 people are undernourished. At the rate we’re going, the food system is simply not sustainable enough, either for a population that will be approaching 10 billion by mid-century, or for the planet it inhabits.
This is because the food system alone produces a third of all greenhouse gases, takes up 70% of the world’s freshwater, and is responsible for 80% of global deforestation. Agriculture also occupies nearly half of all habitable land – but 80% of this is attributable to livestock, which only accounts for 17% of our calorie supply, and 38% of protein consumption.
It’s why many companies are hoping to reshape the food system with future-facing, planet-friendly options, whether it’s plant-based food, cultivated meat, or fermentation-derived proteins. This industry – collectively called alternative protein – has made tremendous strides in the last decade or so, but it needs help.
Help from the public sector, that is. The meat and dairy industries are heavily subsidised by governments across the world, but alternative protein companies see a fraction of the same capital. To truly effect change, and actually make a bid to reach their 1.5°C targets (however unlikely this goal now may be), policymakers need to develop national strategies to propel this industry forward.
“Considering the vulnerabilities in today’s highly centralised global food system – where pandemics, geopolitical crises, and environmental disasters can have far-reaching impacts – a national plan that advances protein diversification helps envision a more resilient, future-ready food supply,” says Alla Voldman, VP of strategy and policy at the Good Food Institute (GFI) Israel.
The alternative protein think tank has worked with Monitor Deloitte to produce a three-step guide for governments across the world to adopt a national action plan for alternative proteins – whether that’s as a standalone approach, or a pillar within existing agrifood or bioeconomy strategies.
Voldman says such national plans help countries ensure their alternative protein progress aligns with broader national priorities and creates synergy across sectors and stakeholders. “This alignment fosters stability, especially in cases where short-term political shifts might otherwise divert resources or support away from long-term food security strategies,” she tells Green Queen.
She adds that these strategies enable greater inclusivity of countries with valuable infrastructure and resources and thus promote global cooperation: “Moreover, such action plans signal to the private sector that the government supports alternative protein development. This confidence encourages innovation, research, and investment, helping to build a robust ecosystem around alternative proteins.”
A three-step process, starting with motivation
Courtesy: Ecovative
The framework targets policy officials, food alliances and NGOs, and sustainability-focused groups that can collectively play a pivotal role in shaping national strategies.
“Given that many policymakers may lack familiarity with the alternative protein ecosystem, these organisations, which have a broader view and understanding of the sector across the value chain, can offer vital insights,” says Voldman. The local expertise of NGOs and food organisations can help tailor strategies to a country’s specific needs, which is a key goal of the report.
Explaining the three-step framework, she says: “First, it encourages viewing the issue from the government’s perspective, understanding what drives government action, and aligning the strategy with national priorities. Second, it emphasises determining the role the country could play in the global food system, leveraging regional strengths to ensure resilience.
“The final step focuses on activation – the how that is sometimes missing from the advocacy discourse—taking a bottom-up approach driven by the local ecosystem, identifying market failures, and pinpointing opportunities where government intervention can have the greatest impact.”
The first stage – the motivation behind adopting such strategies – involves a range of different factors. Countries could be compelled to do so for greater economic growth, more resilient food security, better public health, meeting growing market demand, or as a means of more progressive climate and biodiversity action.
Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen | Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons/CC
For example, Denmark – the first country to adopt a national action plan for plant-based food – did so to speed up its green transition, becoming a trailblazer in climate-friendly food production. But for countries like the Netherlands or Singapore, the aim is to reduce reliance on food imports and boost self-sufficiency.
National motivations can range from long-term strategic plans to adapting current policies. The former would include strategies like Singapore’s digital-first Smart Nation Vision and 30 by 30 food security initiative, China’s ongoing Five-Year Plan for agriculture, or Canada’s 2030 Agenda, all of which namecheck alternative proteins.
Meanwhile, short-term policies can shape long-term ambitions. Countries could have a specific budget for food and agriculture, allocate significant funds for economic growth, and take executive action. The US is the perfect example here – it has budgets like the Farm Bill, funds such as the Inflation Reduction Act, and commitments towards biotech and biomanufacturing.
Setting up a vision and activation roadmap
The alternative protein roadmap | Courtesy: GFI Israel
When it comes to establishing a vision and assessing individual nations’ strengths and weaknesses, several factors are in play. The presence of an enabling environment determines whether there’s a foundation for economic development.
South Korea, which followed Denmark in establishing a plant-based transition plan, has focused on increasing the share of locally farmed products in its strategy. India, meanwhile is banking on its biomanufacturing capabilities to advance its smart protein sector. And nations like the UK, the US, and Singapore are host to multimillion-dollar research institutions set up by the Bezos Earth Fund.
Then there’s the market size, which provides context for the potential value alternative proteins could create domestically, and whether this fulfils the initial motivation. For instance, the US is a large market with a relatively high level of government spending available, enabling a more expansive vision for alternative proteins.
In contrast, Israel’s smaller market size means it’s better suited as an entrepreneurship and venture capital hub that can play an incubator role for research and new projects with global-scale potential. This brings us to the third dimension for establishing a vision: the innovation ecosystem. This outlines whether countries have the right blend of societal factors to help innovators who develop ideas and products, and take risks to launch new ventures.
Courtesy: GFI Israel
Israel is capitalising on its role as an innovation hub by targeting the creation of hundreds of new companies, manufacturing facilities, and significant job opportunities in the alternative protein space. “This highlights how strategic support from the government can foster innovation and stimulate economic growth,” suggests Voldman.
Finally, in the activation stage, there are two primary elements for stakeholders to consider. Countries must define a call to action by identifying critical shortcomings that could hamper its alternative protein goals, as well as the government policies that can bridge these gaps.
So if there’s limited research activity and domestic spending, state-funded grants can help remedy that. And if there’s a low rate of businesses going from pilot to commercial scale, regulatory advancements – like Brazil’s nod to using meat- and dairy-related terms on plant-based packaging and the approval of cultivated meat for sale – will go a long way in shifting that trend.
Meanwhile, developing an effective communication plan to convey the benefits of a protein transition is crucial too. Many countries are doing this by highlighting the employment potential, with studies showing alternative proteins could create 25,000 jobs in the UK, 10,000 in Israel, and 17,000 in Canada.
How to overcome the challenges of adopting alternative protein policies
Courtesy: Those Vegan Cowboys
GFI and its partners are helping several countries across the world develop strategies to support the alternative protein industry, and is offering a free workshop to help organisations kickstart their own efforts. “There’s a growing recognition of the sector’s potential to drive economic growth, enhance food security, and address environmental sustainability, and many governments are increasingly exploring how to incorporate alternative proteins into their national policies,” says Voldman.
Collaboration between stakeholders, meanwhile, is key, says Rune-Christoffer Dragsdahl, secretary-general at the Vegetarian Society of Denmark, which helped shape the country’s action plan. “Throughout the process in Denmark, we drew inspiration from actions taken in other countries, and likewise, we hope others can be inspired by what has recently happened in Denmark and beyond,” he notes.
The report is intended aa a complementary tool to ensure public investments are made in areas with the highest economic and social returns. Research suggests that if governments pump in an additional $4.4B into the R&D and $5.7B into the commercialisation of alternative proteins each year, the industry could support nearly 10 million jobs by 2050.
But several hurdles currently impeded hinder policy progress. “One key challenge is that many countries are still figuring out how to maximise their existing resources to drive investment in alternative proteins,” says Voldman. “Each country has unique strengths – whether in research and development, agricultural resources, or manufacturing capabilities – but there’s often uncertainty about how to align these assets with the growth of an alternative protein sector.”
Courtesy: GFI Israel
The lack of detailed, granular gap analyses is another significant barrier. “Policymakers need a clearer understanding of the specific gaps in their country’s alternative protein ecosystem and the potential return on investment from addressing them. Without this evaluation, it may be difficult to justify allocating public funds or prioritize investments,” she says.
“Additionally, it is sometimes assumed that every country needs to build a venture capital ecosystem or become a commercial manufacturing powerhouse to succeed in alternative proteins,” Voldman adds. In reality, each country can play a different role in the global alternative protein landscape. Some may excel in research, while others focus on sustainable agriculture or supply chain innovations.
“Accepting that there are multiple ways to benefit from the growth of alternative proteins can help countries develop more realistic and effective strategies,” she says, highlighting that these challenges can be addressed by leveraging existing national assets and adopting a more tailored approach to strategy development.
Doing so is absolutely critical to the future of the planet, its biodiversity, food security, and human health. As the report puts it: “If we’re to stay within planetary boundaries, business-as-usual food production won’t cut it.”
In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers a coconut-based infant formula, Marriott Hotels’s food waste driven, and a US government tool for regulatory help.
New products and launches
Los Angeles startup Before the Butcher has introduced a Cooked Plant-Based Breakfast Sausage Patty. The frozen product just needs to be reheated to an internal temperature of 165°F/74°C, and can keep in the freezer for 12 months.
Courtesy: Daring
Also in California, plant-based chicken player Daring has launched two new frozen entrée bowls in Buffalo Mac & Cheese and Queso Burrito variants. Both contain dairy cheese, so aren’t suitable for vegans, and will be available at Albertsons, Target, and Publix stores nationwide.
US grocer Trader Joe’s has brought out an unsweetened version of its Organic Non-Dairy Coconut Beverage, which is available for $2.99 per 32oz pack.
Courtesy: Trader Joe’s
Across the Atlantic, GoodMills Innovation will exhibit three new texturants, two made from peas and one from fava beans and wheat, at the Fi Europe 2024 event in Frankfurt (November 19-21).
Dutch alt-seafood producer Vegan Finest Foods has released three plant-based sushi rolls under its Vegan Zeastar brand. They come in three options: Oshi No Salmon, Spicy No Tuna, and No Salmon Asparagus.
Courtesy: Heura
Spanish plant-based meat maker Heura is opening a pop-up called The Phamacy in France to celebrate its new additive-free white ham. The setting mimics a real pharmacy with staff dressed in medical gear and a menu in the form of prescriptions.
In the UK, plant-based brand Meatless Farm has added two vegan sourdough pizzas to its lineup in Ham & Mushroom Style and Spicy Pepperoni Style flavours (available at Sainsbury’s), while updating its existing Beef Style Meatballs, Pork Style Sausages, and Quarter Pounders (which can be found at Morrisons).
Courtesy: Meatless Farm
Fellow British plant-based meat brand THIS, meanwhile, has partnered with fresh pasta maker Dell’Ugo to release two vegan ravioli products. Available in Bacon & Cheese and Chicken & Pesto flavours, they’re available on the Dell’Ugo website and at Morrisons.
In more UK news, egg alternatives brand Oggs has launched Gingerbread Cakes and Hot Chocolate & Marshmallow Cupcakes as part of its Christmas lineup. The cakes can be found at Sainsbury’s and on Ocado for £3.95, and the cupcakes are stocked at Tesco Express, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Ocado for £2.35.
Courtesy: Coco2
And Australia’s Coco2 has debuted what it claims is the world’s first coconut-based infant formula, which took 10 years to develop alongside the University of Queensland, parents, and healthcare professionals. It offers three products for different age groups: up to six months, six to 12 months, and 12+ months.
Company and finance updates
Marriott Hotels, the world’s largest hotel group, has enlisted AI-powered food waste startup Winnow‘s expertise in 53 of its kitchens in the UK, Ireland and Nordics, after reducing its waste by a quarter in the first six months of 2024 through the technology. The company now aims to cut food waste by 50% in 2025.
North Carolina-based cultivated seafood maker Atlantic Fish Co has won an SBIR PHASE I grant from the US Department of Agriculture, which it will use to advance R&D operations.
In the US, the Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration have jointly released an online tool to help biotech companies – including those involved in cultivated meat, precision fermentation and molecular farming – navigate the regulatory pathway.
Courtesy: Sanrio Co.
At the 2025 Osaka-Kansai Expo, the makers of Hello Kitty will feature the cartoon in an exhibit focused on the sustainability potential of algae. The character will be turned into 32 different types of algae, from triangular microalgae to wakame, looking to promote their role in planet-friendly food, biofuels, bioplastics, etc.
The judge presiding over Upside Foods‘s lawsuit against Florida’s cultivated meat ban held a hearing lasting over two hours, and has suggested he will rule by early November, well before the Art Basel event in Miami Beach (December 6-8), where the startup is hoping to showcase its chicken.
Courtesy: Upside Foods
At the National University of Singapore, scientists have developed a scalable method for cultivating pork fat tissue using protein scaffolds made from secalin, a protein extracted from rye.
Alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute Europe has published an updated edition of its scientific review on cell lines used in cultivated meat.
Finally, while promoting her new climate change movieThe Wild Robot, Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o has endorsed eating plant-based food as one of the ways to “do something good for the planet”.
The UK government has awarded £1.6M to the Food Standards Agency to create a ‘sandbox’ to fast-track cultivated meat approval, alongside a new regulatory office.
Nearly five years after breaking away from the EU, the UK is rapidly stepping up its efforts to bring cultivated meat on British plates.
Today, it has awarded £1.6M to the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to create a first-of-its-kind regulatory ‘sandbox’ for cultivated meat producers. The idea is to “support innovation through safety” by speeding up the timeline and lowering the costs related to regulatory clearance.
Sandboxes comprise controlled environments for situations where scientific and technological innovation has outpaced existing regulation – a lot of companies are currently making cultivated meat, but the UK’s authorisation process is slow and congested. These sandboxes run for a limited period to help startups, researchers and regulators work together to develop new rules, standards and guidance.
The investment for the Cell-Cultivated Products Regulatory Sandbox is part of the first round of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s Engineering Biology Sandbox Fund.
In addition to the financing, the FSA said it is pressing ahead with plans to set up a system of international cooperation, which would see the UK greenlight cultivated meat products that have been approved by other countries.
In a parallel effort, the government has also created a Regulatory Innovation Office to reduce the burden of red tape and accelerate public access to new technologies. It will work together with the Department for Transport, the Department for Health and Social Care, and the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs.
Robert E Jones, president of trade association Cellular Agriculture Europe, said the move signposted the UK’s aim to be an innovation leader by “boosting its global competitiveness in the race to address food security and sustainability issues in our food systems”.
“The UK has the potential to be at the front of the pack in Europe’s projected £70B cultivated meat market, but only if investors know we are open for business,” added Jeremy Coller, president of the Alternative Proteins Association. “The creation of this sandbox is a fantastic step forward for growing British businesses.”
Cultivated meat sandbox will lower costs and approval timeline
Courtesy: Ivy Farm Technologies
Plans to create a sandbox were first announced by the FSA in February, after a 2023 report it commissioned found that speeding up novel foods regulation could help the UK meet its carbon reduction plans. The regulator said it was in talks with food companies and had issued a call for scientists to work alongside the testing project.
Alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe last month called on ministers to approve the FSA’s bid for funding to ensure the agency “can accelerate its understanding of the food safety aspects of cultivated meat”.
Regulatory sandboxes allow companies to test new concepts with real customers under the supervision of a regulator, as designed by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. The cultivated meat sandbox, a first for Europe, would provide pre-application support to startups, expand the safety and nutritional knowledge of novel foods, and reduce approval timelines, all while maintaining safety standards.
Due to launch in February, the sandbox will be jointly run by the FSA and Food Standards Scotland (FSS) over a two-year period, which will collect “rigorous scientific evidence” about the technology behind cultivated meat. The aim is to better guide companies on making products in a safe way, and demonstrating that they are, indeed, safe.
The regulatory bodies will address some of the key questions that need tackling – such as labelling – before cultivated meat hits the market. All this would enable the FSA and FSS to “keep pace with emerging technologies” and apply new, up-to-date insights when clearing novel foods for sale.
The sandbox programme aims to shrink the costs associated with regulatory applications – currently standing at £350,000-£500,000 per product – and help cultivated meat startups attract the investment required to scale up their manufacturing capacity.
So far, five companies have applied for regulatory approval in the UK. London-based Meatly, which targets pet food, is the only one to have received the go-ahead. Israel’s Aleph Farms (whose cultivated beef is already approved in its home country), French startups Vital Meat (cultivated chicken) and Gourmey (cultivated foie gras), and British player Ivy Farm Technologies (cultivated beef) are all waiting in the wings.
Now, the FSA expects at least 15 more applications in the next two years, and predicts that many more startups could crop up thanks to the development.
UK expands efforts to advance cultivated meat
Courtesy: Food Standards Agency
The announcement accompanied the FSA’s confirmation that it will establish a framework for international cooperation for novel food approvals, which was first suggested in May. This would enable the UK to authorise products based on their approvals in other countries like Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.
These plans are yet to be backed by Keir Starmer’s Labour administration. But the FSA is planning to use some of the funds to set up an international regulatory network that would help set up such a system.
Cultivated meat is also on the radar of the new Regulatory Innovation Office, whose engineering biology focus involves helping regulators bring these products to market faster. “By speeding up approvals, providing regulatory certainty and reducing unnecessary delays, we’re curbing the burden of red tape so businesses and our public services can innovate and grow, which means more jobs, a stronger economy, and a better quality of life for people across the UK,” said science and tech secretary Peter Kyle.
“Ensuring consumers can trust the safety of new foods is one of our most crucial responsibilities,” said Prof Robin May, chief scientific advisor to the FSA. “The CCP sandbox programme will enable safe innovation and allow us to keep pace with new technologies being used by the food industry to ultimately provide consumers with a wider choice of safe foods.”
These developments are part of a larger effort by the UK to “modernise” its regulatory framework. In 2025, the FSA is rolling out reforms to the process, which include the creation of a new public register to replace the existing system of requiring a statutory instrument, and removing the need for renewals of approvals every 10 years.
The statutory instrument adds up to six months to a process that already takes over two-and-a-half years, and the renewal requirements add to the FSA’s already crowded backlog – around 22% of its 450-strong caseload are renewal applications, and it expects a further 300 in the next two years as approvals expire.
“New UK government ministers have confirmed they are content to proceed with our two initial market authorisation reform proposals to remove renewal requirements for authorised regulated products and allow authorisations to come into effect following ministerial decisions,” the FSA said last month. “We are now prioritising delivery of this work.”
Further demonstrating its commitment to the cause, the UK government also poured in £15M towards a National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (NAPIC), taking its total investment in the category above £91M. NAPIC involves multiple universities, farmers, regulators, and plant-based, cultivated meat and fermentation startups, alongside international partners like the UN.
Singaporean cultivated seafood pioneer Umami Bioworks has teamed up with two biotech firms to set up a production line and path to market entry in South Korea.
With cultivated meat progressing rapidly in South Korea – thanks to the government’s establishment of a regulatory framework for these products – SIngapore’s Umami Bioworks is the latest to join the country’s burgeoning sector.
The cultivated seafood producer has signed an MoU with biotech firm KCell Biosciences and bioprocess solutions provider WSG to set up a scalable domestic production pipeline for cultivated seafood in South Korea, with a view to accelerate these products’ market entry in the country.
In what is one of the world’s largest seafood consumers, Umami Bioworks will combine its seafood cultivation technology, with KCell Biosciences’s cell culture media expertise and WSG’s bioprocessing hardware. The consortium will not only focus on the commercialisation of cultivated seafood in South Korea, but also serve as a model for future partnerships across Asia.
“Umami is providing the production process, cell lines, and product forming technology, while K-Cell is supplying cell culture media ingredients, and WSG is providing the production hardware,” Umami Bioworks founder and CEO Mihir Pershad tells Green Queen. “Collectively, we can deliver a true plug-and-play solution at a scale and cost suitable for leading food producers.”
Manufacturing plans and path to price parity
Courtesy: Umami Bioworks
Umami Bioworks, which merged with fellow cultivated seafood player Shiok Meats earlier this year, is aiming to strengthen its production capacity to meet local market demands, regulatory frameworks, as well as consumer expectations about quality and sustainability.
It suggests that coupling WSG’s cost-effective bioprocess systems with KCell’s competitively priced media will ensure an efficient and scalable solution for cultivated seafood, allowing the three companies to ensure the safety and regulatory approval of these products in South Korea, and establish a path for commercialisation across the region.
“The packaged solutions of Umami’s bioprocess system, KCell’s cell-culture media production and WSG’s stainless infrastructure surpass the level of price parity for food companies licensing in the manufacturing of cell-cultivated seafood products,” says Victor Kang, CEO of KCell Biosciences and WSG Group.
Pershad says Umami Bioworks has made “substantial progress” on its costs this year, and will be manufacturing its first product at price parity with conventional seafood by the end of the year. “This would enable [us] to produce with a positive margin from the pilot commercial facility that would come online in 2025,” he explains.
This is key if cultivated meat is to take off in South Korea – only 12% of Koreans are willing to pay ₩1,000-3,000 (74 cents to $2.2) more per 100g of cultivated meat. On the other hand, 57% would eat cultivated pork if it’s cheaper than its conventional counterpart, and 25% would do so for beef too.
“Our intent is to bring each product we launch to market at price parity within the category to ensure we are creating a real opportunity for sustainable system transformation, and that price does not become a barrier to adoption,” he adds. “Our R&D pipeline has created a path for substantial cost production over the next 12 to 18 months as well, which will enable us to launch future products at parity with mid-market, and eventually mass-market, price points.”
Umami Bioworks’s is licencing its technology to customers for large-scale production, while maintaining enough internal production to validate its own processes at scale. “As such, we’ve currently established production capability for tens of kilograms and will extend that to a ton-scale demonstrator in early 2025,” reveals Pershad.
Umami Bioworks targeting regulatory approval in multiple countries
Courtesy: Umami Bioworks
This is one of a number of partnerships Umami Bioworks has established in the last 12 months. In December, it teamed up with Malaysia’s Cell Agritech to set up large-scale production sites. And this year, it collaborated with two Indian research initiatives, and joined forces with Friends & Family Pet Food Co. in the US for cultivated pet food.
“Our partnerships in India are helping to progress our R&D and enhance our capabilities for cell line development from new species as well as scale-up. In the US, we are progressing both commercial and regulatory efforts to bring pet food to market in the near future,” says Pershad.
“In South Korea, our efforts will focus on progressing regulatory work to get a first approval while concurrently preparing those products for market launch with established food company customers, whose names we will be announcing in the coming months,” he adds.
South Korea began inviting applications for regulatory approval of cultivated meat in February after successfully establishing a framework for companies. “We are currently adapting our regulatory materials to the format preferred by South Korean regulators, as well as translating critical materials in preparation for submission,” Pershad says.
“We are in active review with documents submitted to regulators in major markets across America, Europe, and Asia. We’re having productive conversations with regulators, but could not comment specifically on the rate of progress or estimated approval dates,” he adds when asked about the startup’s pursuit of approval in other countries.
He confirms that Umami Bioworks is looking for clearance for both pet and human applications, and expects the first products (in collaboration with commercial partners) to come to market next year. “It’s difficult to say which may get approved first, though in general, the pet product review processes tend to operate on shorter timelines than the human novel food reviews,” he says.
The cultivated meat sector is evolving rapidly in South Korea, with the government creating a regulatory-free special zone designed for these cultivated foods, which harbours 10 startups. The Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries is also investing ₩28.6B ($21M) in research funding for its plant-based and cultivated seafood tech.
In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Sunday Supper’s plant-based mozzarella sticks, M&S’s new vegan cookies, and a cultivated meat tasting in India.
New products and launches
US vegan frozen foods maker Sunday Supper has released Mozza Fritto, a dairy-free mozzarella stick SKU. It’s available at Besties Vegan Paradise in Los Angeles and Orchard Grocer in New York City, and will be at Giant, Bristol Farms, and Good Eggs this month, selling for $9.99 for three servings.
Courtesy: Sunday Supper
As it conducts a regulatory feeding trial for cultivated meat, Further Foods, the portfolio brand of Cult Food Science, is launching a line of vegan Sprinkles toppers for pet food under its Noochies! brand. The 4oz packs will be available in six flavours (three apiece for dogs and cats), and retail for $16.99 in the US and Canada.
Cultivated meat is now officially banned in Alabama. But before it came into effect, Upside Foodstook its Freedom of Food tasting event to the state for locals to try its chicken before it became illegal.
Italian food giant Barilla is bringing its vegan pesto to the US as part of a flavour expansion, which will be available exclusively at Krogers stores starting this month.
Courtesy: Barilla
There’s a new almond milk on the block. Sól Date‘s milks are sweetened with dates and come in Original, Chocolate and Vanilla flavours, and can already be found in 400 locations, with another 250 slated for January.
In more dairy-free news, Canadian vegan cheese brand Daiya has shaken up its frozen pizza range, which has a “lighter, fluffier, and crispier gluten-free crust” and the new Oat Cream cheese.
In the Netherlands, The Vegetarian Butcher‘s Pulled Beef Strips are now featured on the menu of meal startup Mama’s Maaltijden, part of a poké bowl with sushi rice and pickled cucumbers.
Courtesy: La Vie
French plant-based meat leader La Vie has teased two new products in Apple’s trademark marketing style, showing the “advantageous curves” of the packaging. They will come out at the end of October in Italian-style and Spicy Asian flavours, and apparently won’t trigger the meat labelling lobby. We think it’s sausages – what’s your guess?
Meanwhile, La Vie has also rolled out its smoked ham at Sainsbury’s stores across the UK.
French vegan ingredient company Ingood by Olga has introduced Lengood, a fermented green lentil powder that is designed as a clean-label egg alternative for bakery and pastry products.
In the UK, pub chain Wetherspoons has added a limited-edition Korean-inspired vegan sticky fried chicken bowl using Quorn‘s mycoprotein meat. It’s served alongside chips and coconut rice.
UK supermarket M&S has released vegan speculoos and chocolate chip cookies in a light-up tin, as part of its Christmas range. It retails for £7.
Speaking of British retailers, Slovenian whole-cut plant-based meat producer Juicy Marbles is now selling its vegan steaks at Sainsbury’s, available in two-packs for £7 at 553 stores nationwide.
Courtesy: HAPPIEE!
Singaporean vegan seafood brandHAPPIEE! has expanded its UK presence, with its plant-based shrimp, squid and calamari now available at Sainsbury’s and Morissons (from next week).
A new vegan sweets brand has been set up by a former Mondelez International executive. Wild Thingz makes bug-shaped fruit gummies in Zesty Pests, Fruity Flyers and Gummy Grubs, which will be available as 25g packs for 90p and 130g bags for £2.99.
Staying with confectionery for a second, UK vegan oat milk chocolate maker H!P is getting festive with a new £12 advent calendar that features its plain, orange, salted caramel and gingerbread offerings. In addition, it’s launching a Gingerbread Cookie Bar, H!P ‘n’ Mix Festive Pouch, and a Christmas gift box.
Courtesy: H!P
In Thailand, vegan cheese brand Swees has released with what it claims are the world’s first rice-based cheese sticks, with backing from the national government.
Company and finance updates
Spain’s Pascual Innoventures has upped its investment in the first three editions of the Mylcubator programme to over $2M, with its latest infusion going to precision fermentation egg startup Onego Bio.
Courtesy: Oshi
Israeli vegan seafood player Oshi has received two million shekels ($550,000) as part of grant funding by the Israeli Innovation Authority.
In Sweden, Örebro University’s PAN Sweden research centre has been awarded 40 million kronor ($3.9M) from the state research council Formas for its work on plant proteins. Agrifood company Lantmännen is a key actor in the project.
Swedish pea milk pioneer Sproud has raised 14.4 Swedish kronor ($1.4M) in a fresh funding round, adding to the $1M it secured back in March.
Courtesy: Sproud
UK startup Fermtech has brought in £360,000 in crowdfunding (moving past its £325,000 target) for its ‘zero-carbon’ koji protein, using spent grain from breweries as feedstock.
Californian firm Triplebar is restructuring to amp up its focus on developing a generative AI genomic language model by 2026 to disrupt the food and medicine industries.
In Singapore, Temasek-owned sustainable food innovation platform Nurasa has signed an MoU with Food Harbour Hamburg to bring together companies from both regions to develop planet-friendly food solutions.
Courtesy: Steakholder Foods
Meanwhile, Israeli food tech startup Steakholder Foods has signed a deal with frozen foods manufacturer Bondor Foods to supply plant-based premises for vegan white fish and salmon patties.
Indian cultivated meat startup Biokraft Foods is hosting its first public tastings for cultivated chicken after completing an internal validation for the product. The tastings will be held in Mumbai and Pune.
Elsewhere, cell-based chocolate makerCalifornia Cultured has received an investment from Sparkalis, the corporate venture arm of Belgian B2B bakery, patisserie and chocolate leader Puratos Group.
Courtesy: California Cultured
Job platform Alt Protein Careers has expanded into Europe, and several startups – from Redefine Meat to Mewery – are already advertising roles there.
Policy developments
Over 100 organisations and academics are calling on the UN FAO to retract its Pathways Towards Lower Emissions report from COP28, which downplayed the impact of livestock and climate change. It follows a similar open letter from July, which itself came months after authors whose work the report was based on asked the FAO to retract its report. The latest letter comes after the FAO doubled down on its stance.
In California, the share of meatless meal options in school lunches increased from 7% in 2019 to 11% in 2023. The number of high schools offering veggie meals also rose from 36% to 56%.
Courtesy: Friends of the Earth
UK charity The Vegan Society and the International Rights Network have helped remove veganism from the National Health Service‘s Prevent training, a counter-terrorism programme designed to identify those at risk of radicalisation. Before the intervention, veganism was being referenced in the training.
Finally, The Vegan Society is also celebrating a major milestone: it recently crossed 70,000 product certifications with its Vegan Trademark.
China’s potential biotech dominance – especially its progress with cultivated meat – has spurred Republicans to call for US action to ensure “continued leadership”.
What would it take for a Republican to support cultivated meat?
Could it be China’s progress in the sector? That’s one way to interpret a letter sent by 11 Republican Congress members to the director of national intelligence and the USDA’s director of homeland security last week.
First obtained by Politico’s Morning Agriculture newsletter, the letter was led by House Representatives Andrew Garbarino (R-NY) and Dan Newhouse (R-WA), in direct response to the national intelligence director’s annual threat assessment. That report labelled China’s strategic advancements in “synthetic biology and agricultural biotechnology” as an attempt to “lead the broader biotechnological landscape”.
China’s latest five-year plan for agricultural and rural tech development in 2021 calls for research in cultivated meat, alternative egg and dairy, and recombinant proteins, which the lawmakers described in their letter as China looking to “dominate global supply chains”.
China’s biotech strides and focus on cultivated meat
Courtesy: UN Geneva/CC
China has been making moves towards alternative protein as part of its national climate, economic, and public health targets. Its citizens are already eating more protein per capita than the US now, and most of this comes from animal-free sources.
Aside from the aforementioned agricultural strategy, the ongoing five-year bioeconomy development plan has outlined an advancement of man-made protein and novel foods. And it came just two months after President Xi Jinping called for a Grand Food Vision that included plant-based and microorganism-derived protein sources.
In 2020, the science and tech ministry launched the Green Biological Manufacturing initiative, which set aside ¥600M ($93M at the time) in funding for research projects – around ¥20M was said to be earmarked for cultivated meat and plant-based protein companies. Similarly, in 2021, the government announced a proect focused on high-efficiency biomanufacturing tech for meat analogues, led by agricultural science institute the Jiangnan University.
According to alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) APAC, the National Natural Science Foundation of China has backed many cultivated meat and plant-based research teams too, with similar funding mechanisms available at provincial and city levels.
Last year, Shanghai was the site of a meeting convened by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, where cellular agriculture companies engaged with regulators over production processes and safety concerns.
GFI has further suggested that China’s cultivated meat sector has expanded in an environment that features much lower costs than Europe or the US, with local governments taking steps to ensure that the cost of equipment like bioreactors stays low.
Meanwhile, the national government has been encouraging citizens to eat fewer animal products and more plant proteins, as part of a broader drive to connect public health with socioeconomic development, which began with the Healthy China 2030 policy.
And then there’s the climate benefits: cultivated meat has a much lighter impact on the planet than industrial livestock production. China’s 30-60 climate policy is aimed at hitting peak emissions by 2030 and becoming carbon-neutral by 2060 – and research has shown that this will only be possible if half of all proteins consumed in the country come from alternative sources.
Republicans highlight the importance of alternative protein
Courtesy: Jimi Biotech
The Congress members’ letter implored the US intelligence community to “conduct a focused analysis” on the potential impact of China’s advancements in innovative protein technologies, and its implications for the global food supply.
“Countries around the world are recognising the need to pursue innovative farming techniques to complement their existing agricultural structures,” the letter reads. “The innovative protein sector’s rapid evolution and its potential to reshape global food markets underscore the urgency of responding to these developments.”
Pointing to precedents that show how rapidly global trade patterns shift, the lawmakers write: “Should China secure a dominant position in the global innovative protein market, it could fundamentally alter food supply dynamics worldwide and give China control of key aspects of global food security dynamics.
“Put simply, we cannot allow China to control more of the world’s food supply than it already does. To cede American leadership in the global innovative protein market to foreign adversaries like China is to forfeit the food security of the United States and its allies.”
The Congress members conclude by asking the intelligence agencies to recommend strategic measures the US should consider to “ensure continued leadership and resilience in this critical sector”.
An indication of the US’s response to China’s biotech dominance came in May when the House of Representatives passed the Biosecure Act to prevent local biopharma companies from working with Chinese contractors due to national security concerns.
But if the US wants to continue being a leader in the alternative protein and biotech sectors – the country is home to the highest number of companies in this sector – it would perhaps be better if its policymakers stopped bringing bills to try and ban cultivated meat.
Courtesy: Morning Consult
Yesterday, Alabama’s ban came into effect, three months after Florida’s did (the latter is now being sued over the legislation). Policymakers in a number of other states – including Illinois, Nebraska and Arizona – have proposed similar moves, and they have almost exclusively been Republican. This isn’t a surprise, considering how a study by Morning Consult found Republicans to be much less receptive to cultivated meat than Democrats.
These politicians would do well to encourage their GOP colleagues and heed their words, which acknowledge that alternative protein can reshape global markets, and there’s a need for governments to back this industry. Whether that falls on deaf ears, only time will tell.
Israel’s Believer Meats has joined forces with German engineering firm GEA to help scale up production of cultivated meat, ahead of opening the industry’s largest facility next year.
Early next year, the world’s largest manufacturing facility for cultivated meat will open its doors in North Carolina. Its owner, Israeli startup Believer Meats, is already planning ahead to optimise its processes in the long run.
The company has partnered with German corporation GEA – one of the biggest suppliers of production-scale equipment for the food and beverage sector – to develop technologies and processes that would drive down the costs and emissions associated with producing cultivated meat.
“Believer is on track to overcome the biggest obstacles to scalability,” said Believer Meats CEO Gustavo Burger. “By partnering with GEA – one of the world’s foremost engineering and biotech equipment manufacturers – we are taking the next step in innovating state-of-the-art technology and process engineering capabilities needed to produce cultivated meat products at the right cost.”
Climate and costs at the forefront
Courtesy: Believer Meats
The collaboration aims to enhance the unit economics and sustainability aspects of cultivated meat by optimising the performance and efficiency of manufacturing, starting with chicken before expanding to other products.
Believer Meats and GEA will look to drive advancements in bioreactor technology, perfusion systems, and media rejuvenation. They will also adopt numerous strategies to lower the climate impact of producing cultivated meat, including optimised water usage, power consumption, and circular economy initiatives like waste stream utilisation.
GEA will develop and commission bioreactors for Believer Meat’s technology, specifically designed to deliver high cell densities and yields. The latter’s centrifuge-based perfusion and cell media rejuvenation process is said to optimise cell performance and save water, nutrients, and resources, allowing the startup to reduce production costs by eliminating byproducts and enabling the reuse of media.
“The partnership with GEA will help maximise production yields efficiently and sustainably, which are top priorities for Believer,” said Burger. “The cultivated meat industry is forging a new path that has never been travelled. We are thrilled to partner with GEA and are very optimistic about the future.”
The two companies will further seek to set up joint commercial ventures, leveraging each other’s strengths and resources to expand market reach and speed up the industry’s growth to full scale.
“With the global population expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, there is a clear need to feed more people using fewer resources,” said GEA CEO Stefan Klebert. “We share Believer’s vision that cell cultivation technology is the key to making safe, healthy meat broadly available and affordable.”
The deal comes just months after Believer Meats signed an MoU with Abu Dhabhi’s new food and water cluster, AgriFood Growth & Water Abundance, to establish research and production centres in the city in a bid to combat food and water insecurity.
Believer Meats study proves cheap cultivated meat possible
Courtesy: Believer Meats
Believer Meats announced plans for its facility in late 2022. The 200,000 sq ft plant, located in Wilson County, North Carolina, will feature an innovation centre and tasting kitchen, and be able to churn out 12,000 tonnes of cultivated chicken every year. It’s expected to be operational at the beginning of 2025.
According to McKinsey, it will take until at least 2030 for cultivated meat to be cost-competitve with its conventional counterparts, and this is after companies have cut costs by 99% in less than a decade. One investor told Reuters that these products need to reach manufacturing costs of $2.92 per pound to breach price parity.
Believer Meats has already demonstrated the potential of its technology to lower the costs of producing cultivated chicken. Teaming up with researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, it showcased how using tangential flow filtration (TFF) – an efficient way to separate and purify biomolecules – can be an effective method for the continuous manufacturing of cultivated meat.
Inspired by how Ford’s automated assembly line transformed the auto industry in the early 20th century, their new bioreactor assembly method allowed biomass expansion of 130 billion cells per litre, with a yield of 43% weight per volume. This process of cultivating the chicken cells was carried out continuously for over 20 days, leading to daily harvests of the biomass.
The research, published in the Nature Food journal, suggested that this could bring down the cost of cultivated chicken to $6.20 per lb, in line with the retail price of conventional organic chicken.
“Our findings show that continuous manufacturing enables cultivated meat production at a fraction of current costs, without resorting to genetic modification or mega-factories,” said Believer Meats founder Yaakov Nahmias. “This technology brings us closer to making cultivated meat a viable and sustainable alternative to traditional animal farming.”
North Carolina, meanwhile, is also home to one of Bezos Earth Fund‘s Centers for Sustainable Protein. The alternative protein research hub at NC State University is primarily focused on biomanufacturing and commercialising new technologies – and counts Believer Meats as one of its industry partners.
In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Upside Foods’ tasting event at a taqueria, Japan Airlines’ sweet protein partnership, and a UK state investment into climate-resilient legumes.
New products and launches
Cultivated meat leader Upside Foodsshowcased its chicken at Chicago taqueria Antique Taco, weeks before a judge will consider its preliminary injunction as part of a lawsuit against Florida’s cultivated meat ban.
Courtesy: Jessica Halper/LinkedIn
You can now eat sweet proteins on the fly, literally. Japan Airlines has partnered with Californian food tech startup Oobli to offer its chocolates on the Tokyo-San Francisco route. They’re made from Oubli Sweet Protein, a sugar alternative that has no impact on blood glucose.
Frozen meat-free brand Amy’s Kitchen has expanded its plant-based footprint, replacing eggs with tofu in its breakfast wraps and scrambles.
Next year, New York City will be host to the first Plant Powered Kids Festival, a fully vegan event that will include family-friendly activities like workshops, cooking classes and yoga sessions, alongside food from plant-based vendors. It will be held at Industry City in Brooklyn on February 2.
Courtesy: Just Salad
US fast-casual chain Just Salad has madeImpossible Foods‘s vegan chicken a permanent menu item with its fall menu launch. The plant-based Unbreaded Chicken Filet is part of a Southwest Crunch salad and a Vegan Chipotle Wrap, and also available as a protein option in Build-Your-Own orders.
Speaking of chains, Slutty Vegan is part of the Pepsi Dig In Restaurant Royalty Residency in Las Vegas. Founder Pinky Cole will be serving up its signature Fussy Hussy burger at Mandalay Bay’s Libertine Social and Luxor’s Public House for four weeks through October 18.
Courtesy: Slutty Vegan
British vegan food producer Marigold Health Foods – maker of Engevita nutritional yeast, vegan boullion cubes, and canned meat analogues – has teamed up with packaging specialist Sonoco to launch fully recyclable packaging for a range of its products. The latter’s EnviroCan is designed with a paper bottom and can be recycled by consumers kerbside.
Also in the UK, The Tofoo Co – recently acquired by Comitis Capital – has introduced a Tofoo Katsu SKU in its added value line, which will be available at Sainsbury’s for £3 per 240g pack.
Shortly after its Swiss launch, artisan vegan cheese brand Julienne Bruno has entered the Republic of Ireland via 65 stores, offering its plant-based Burrella, Crematta and Superstraccia SKUs from €5.29-5.95.
Courtesy: Julienne Bruno
Parisian meat analogue maker La Vie‘s bacon will be on the menu at Picadeli at French retailer Monoprix and in Sweden for the next two months.
German beverage manufacturer Waldemar Behn is making its vodka-based Dooley’s Creamy Liqueur brand entirely vegan. It will relaunch the range in 700ml bottles next month, swapping out the dairy with coconut and soy milk instead.
And ahead of Oktoberfest, German food tech innovator Planteneers is offering manufacturers its fiildMeat S 141501 modular system to make plant-based meats for street food classics, such as bratwrusts as well as hot dog sauces.
Company and financial news
The UK’s Department for Environment, Rural and Social Affairs (Defra) has pumped in £3M towards four research organisations to develop climate-resilient legume crops.
Hollywood star Gal Gadot‘s mac and cheese brand Goodles, which has a vegan SKU, has hired a new CFO in Chris Hall after sales tripled in 2023.
Courtesy: Flora/Warren Goldswain/Getty Images
Dutch alt-dairy leader Upfield has renamed itself to Flora Food Group to reflect its flagship butter range, and acquired a manufacturing facility located in Hugoton, Kansas to produce creams and cream cheeses for the North American market.
Speaking of factories, Thai plant-based cheese company Swees has opened a fully vegan-certified facility for co-manufacturing.
Croatian plant protein producer Nutris has been acquired by Swedish investment firm Summa Equity for an undisclosed sum.
Courtesy: Nutris
Scottish startup MiAlgae has secured $18.5M to produce omega-3 fatty acids via microalgae fermentation. It will use the capital to build an industrial-scale facility in the country.
As it awaits regulatory approval in Singapore, Dutch cultivated meat producer Meatable has received €7.6M ($8.5M) in state funding, under the Netherlands Enterprise Agency‘s Innovation Credit programme.
At Wageningen University, the Bioprocess Engineering Chair Group’s cellular agriculture team has obtained a €1.5M investment from Korean biotech firm Whoniz to work on cultivated meat and seafood.
Courtesy: Odd Burger
Canadian vegan fast-food chain Odd Burger has announced the private placement of $4M of convertible debt after reporting its highest quarterly revenues since going public.
Israel’s MNDL Bio has raised $2M to expand its AI-powered gene optimisation platform, which is said to accelerate R&D, lower costs, and bolter success rates in synthetic biology.
Impact investor Earth First Food Ventures has kickstarted a $10M Series A round to expand its financing portfolio in the alt-dairy segment and introduce a $50M precision fermentation fund.
Policy and research developments
The EU’s regulation requiring manufacturers to produce caps that stay tethered to the plastic bottles has been in place for a couple of months now, and has annoyed manydrinkers. But with the EU set to double down on its plastic waste strategy, the caps are here to stay.
Cultivated meat startups Meatable and Umami Bioworks have joined the APAC Society for Cellular Agriculture, expanding its membership to 12.
Courtesy: The Every Company
Precision fermentation egg maker The Every Company has secured a foundational patent in the US for its animal-free ovalbumin protein.
Food advocacy organisation ProVeg International has taken over the Portuguese Vegetarian Association to open an office in Portugal, joining 12 other locations globally.
Cellular Agriculture Australia has released a report calling for clearer, more verifiable impact claims and metrics from companies in the cultivated meat and cellular ag space.
Courtesy: NYC Health + Hospitals
Across the Pacific, New York University hosted the 2024 Plant-Based Food Festival, where it announced that it has signed on to the city’s Plant-Powered Carbon Challenge.
Scientists at the National University of Singapore have found a way to fortify soy whey with Bifidobacteria strain and propionic acid bacteria to increase vitamin B12 levels in plant-based products.
In an advancement for vegan seafood, researchers in China have created plant-based simulated yellow croaker meat tissues by dual-nozzle 3D printing.
Finally, a new docuseries goes behind the scenes of the plant-based culinary scene in Portland, Oregon. The V Word will be released tomorrow, September 26 on streaming network WaterBear, and explores the lifestyle through a cultural lens via the city’s vegan restaurants.
At a food safety summit in New Delhi, India’s health minister JP Nadda underscored the importance of building a regulatory framework for novel foods like cultivated meat.
The Indian government’s support for alternative proteins continues to shore up, with the country’s health minister highlighting the importance of regulatory reform for foods like cultivated meat.
Speaking at the Global Food Regulators Summit 2024 in New Delhi, JP Nadda commended the work of the Food Safety Standards and Authority of India (FSSAI) in the first 100 days of the new coalition administration, putting it in the context of a growing list of food safety advancements needed in India.
“We face a complex array of challenges, from persistent foodborne illness to emerging concerns such as new nutraceutical safety, novel foods, and the microplastics in our food chain, all while striving for sustainability,” said Nadda, the Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare.
“In this dynamic environment, the role of food regulators has never been more crucial. This demands continuous collaboration, relentless innovation, and a commitment to constant improvement in our food safety systems,” he added.
India working on novel food regulatory framework
It’s still early doors for technologies like cell cultivation and precision fermentation in India, with only a handful of companies involved in these sectors at present.
But there have been a number of advancements in the last few months, propelled by the FSSAI’s work on developing a regulatory framework for these foods, which would allow companies to apply for and receive clearance to sell their products on the market.
Currently, the FSSAI categorises cultivated meat and precision-fermented foods as ‘non-specified’ products or ‘novel foods’, since they have no history of consumption in the country. But in March, it was reported that the food safety regulator was formulating a framework for these proteins, with a senior official saying: “We are working on drafting regulations for cultured meat products.”
Nadda said that the health ministry and the FSAI have been “playing a pivotal role in developing standards” in line with international trade, evolving food production processes, and changing consumption patterns.
“The rapid globalisation, technological advancements, and evolving consumer preferences are reshaping our food systems at an unprecedented pace,” he explained. “FSSAI has made remarkable strides in reviewing and developing new standards based on cutting-edge advancements in food technology.”
That said, while it is believed that cultivated meat will be regulated under the Approval of Non-Specified Food and Food Ingredients Regulations (NSF Regulations) by the FSSAI, there is currently no specific definition of cultivated meat or guidance provided under these rules.
The FSSAI had previously formed a Working Group on Cultured Meat with regulatory and scientific experts to study the possible regulatory pathways for cultivated meat in India, although experts say the framework needs to be more dynamic and align with ongoing innovations.
“Developing a regulatory framework that adapts to scientific advancements and is not rigid, but accommodates the innovations in this sector, would be essential to India setting an example for a dynamic and effective regulatory framework on cultivated meat,” Astha Gaur, regulatory policy specialist at alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) India, told Green Queen in March.
Increasing government interest in alternative proteins
Courtesy: Umami Bioworks
Nadda’s comments – which also involved a focus on sustainable packaging – come just a month after India announced its BioE3 policy. The climate-focused bioeconomy strategy counted smart proteins and functional foods as one of its six pillars.
“By providing dedicated R&D and innovation support, the policy will accelerate the development of new technologies and processes that can pave the way towards the nutrition, price, and taste parity of smart protein products, making them a truly competitive alternative to their animal-derived counterparts,” GFI India acting managing director Sneha Singh told Green Queen at the time.
Announcing the country’s latest budget in July, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the government will set up 100 accredited food safety labs nationwide. Along similar lines, India has also set up a $5.9M National Research Foundation to expand research across sectors including food safety (Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke about lab-grown diamonds at its first board meeting).
Meanwhile, Bengaluru is host to two new alternative protein hubs. The Centre for Smart Protein and Sustainable Material Innovation is focused on incubation, equipment access, and product development, while the Alternative Proteins Innovation Center is an integrated R&D facility for ingredient and product development.
Singapore’s Umami Bioworks has partnered with the former to accelerate research and scalability of its cultivated seafood, while also setting up an R&D facility at the Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology in Chennai. Fellow cultivated meat startup Neat Meatt Biotech – based in New Delhi – is working with the government’s ICAR-Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute to develop cultivated fish too.
These advancements serve as proof that India has a burgeoning cultivated meat sector, but one that needs better consumer awareness. A 2023 survey revealed that the number of Indians familiar with the term (42%) was almost identical to those who weren’t (41%). And while 40% expressed interest in trying cultivated meat, a third of respondents “stayed neutral and didn’t answer the question”, highlighting the industry’s public perception challenges.
Nadda wasn’t the only national government official talking up novel foods last week. In the UK, science secretary Peter Kyle was asked about cultivated meat on Sunday. “I think it’s an exciting area of science. Britain is leading the way on its development,” he responded.
“The market would tell – we’re not going to force anyone to eat it. But let’s see whether this can contribute to the health of our nation, and help with the challenges of climate change. And for those people who have concerns about animal rights, then they may well offer something for them as well.”
The UK’s Food Standards Agency has announced it will implement changes to speed up and ‘modernise’ the authorisation process for novel foods. But experts say more needs to be done.
Next year, the UK’s food safety regulator will introduce changes to its regulatory framework for market authorisations in an attempt at “modernising” the process.
In its latest board meeting yesterday, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) ratified changes to the approval process for foods like cultivated meat and precision-fermented products. The move will see the creation of a new public register that replaces the existing system of requiring a statutory instrument, which adds up to six months to a process that already takes over two-and-a-half years.
Following a consultation with industry stakeholders and approval by the new Labour government, the regulator announced it hopes to roll out the reforms in early 2025.
The overhaul could benefit a range of food industry players and consumers while continuing to uphold the FSA’s rigorous safety standards. It also marks a departure from the EU-like regulations the agency had retained post-Brexit, which it said haven’t been designed to operate in a UK context.
“We hope British alternative protein companies will be reassured that the FSA is taking sensible steps to modernise its process while continuing to enforce a gold-standard regulatory system that can give consumers confidence in new products,” Linus Pardoe, UK policy manager at GFI Europe, told Green Queen.
But GFI Europe warned that the UK needs even more ambitious methods to keep up with the global pace, urging the government to draw on inspiration from other progressive regulatory frameworks internationally.
FSA proposals met with broad support
Courtesy: Food Standards Agency
The changes – which affect ‘regulated products’ like feed additives, food flavourings, and alternative proteins – were first proposed by the FSA in March.
The food regulator sought to remove renewal requirements for feed additives, and food or feed containing or produced from GMOs. Currently, products that have been approved need to reapply for clearance every 10 years, which crowds up the FSA’s docket. Around 22% of its current caseload are renewal applications, and it expects a further 300 in 2025 and 2026 as approvals expire.
“Removing the requirements for renewals will promote a more proactive and dynamic approach to maintaining food and feed safety,” the FSA commented, noting that it would mean applications in the system “decrease considerably, releasing resources to focus on new marketing authorisations, including innovative products”.
The second proposal revolved around the new public register. At the moment, the parliament needs to pass statutory instruments before a novel food can go on the market, which is a time-consuming process. The FSA suggested that the removal of this step would speed up approvals by three months, allowing products to be commercialised following a ministerial decision.
Both proposals received broad support from stakeholders, which included cultivated meat startups like Mosa Meat and Meatable – 71% agreed with the plan to scrap renewal requirements, while a similar 70% were in favour of removing the statutory instrument process.
“New UK government ministers have confirmed they are content to proceed with our two initial market authorisation reform proposals to remove renewal requirements for authorised regulated products and allow authorisations to come into effect following ministerial decisions,” the FSA said. “We are now prioritising delivery of this work.”
While the FSA will continue to conduct rigorous assessments of food safety with ministers the final decision-makers, it argued that the changes will release resources to focus on new authorisations: “Consumers will benefit from new, safe products reaching the market more quickly, including novel foods and products which have sustainability and environmental benefits.”
UK government must implement ‘wider-ranging measures’
The regulator has been pushing to move past the inherited EU legislation, which it said was transferred to the UK with minor amendments for operability. It called the EU requirements “prescriptive and, in some cases, not proportionate to the risk”.
Outlining how the caseload is expected to rise from 450 in March 2024 to 570 by March 2026.” Without urgent action, we will be unable to keep pace with this growing caseload. This will affect consumers’ choice and access to new and potentially beneficial products,” it said.
The regulator has also been hoping to win government funding that it would use to create a regulatory ‘sandbox’ for the safety testing of cultivated meat. Alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe – which has welcomed the FSA’s changes – is calling on ministers to approve this bid in next month’s budget. This would ensure “the body can accelerate its understanding of the food safety aspects of cultivated meat.”
“But to send a clear signal to startups, the FSA and UK government must quickly follow these initial steps with more wide-ranging measures to modernise our regulatory system, ensuring it keeps up with the rapid pace of innovation,” said Pardoe.
“The government should implement an ambitious range of reforms to modernise the UK’s novel foods regulatory framework, such as producing clear guidance for companies planning on submitting applications for cultivated meat and precision fermentation products and formalising a process for startups to enter pre-submission consultations,” he explained.
“They should also share information about risk assessments with trusted international partners and should follow the Dutch government by designing a system for pre-market tastings, enabling companies to work closely with consumers to develop products.”
The UK’s Food Standards Agency has announced it will implement changes to speed up and ‘modernise’ the authorisation process for novel foods. But experts say more needs to be done.
Next year, the UK’s food safety regulator will introduce changes to its regulatory framework for market authorisations in an attempt at “modernising” the process.
In its latest board meeting yesterday, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) ratified changes to the approval process for foods like cultivated meat and precision-fermented products. The move will see the creation of a new public register that replaces the existing system of requiring a statutory instrument, which adds up to six months to a process that already takes over two-and-a-half years.
Following a consultation with industry stakeholders and approval by the new Labour government, the regulator announced it hopes to roll out the reforms in early 2025.
The overhaul could benefit a range of food industry players and consumers while continuing to uphold the FSA’s rigorous safety standards. It also marks a departure from the EU-like regulations the agency had retained post-Brexit, which it said haven’t been designed to operate in a UK context.
“We hope British alternative protein companies will be reassured that the FSA is taking sensible steps to modernise its process while continuing to enforce a gold-standard regulatory system that can give consumers confidence in new products,” Linus Pardoe, UK policy manager at GFI Europe, told Green Queen.
But GFI Europe warned that the UK needs even more ambitious methods to keep up with the global pace, urging the government to draw on inspiration from other progressive regulatory frameworks internationally.
FSA proposals met with broad support
Courtesy: Food Standards Agency
The changes – which affect ‘regulated products’ like feed additives, food flavourings, and alternative proteins – were first proposed by the FSA in March.
The food regulator sought to remove renewal requirements for feed additives, and food or feed containing or produced from GMOs. Currently, products that have been approved need to reapply for clearance every 10 years, which crowds up the FSA’s docket. Around 22% of its current caseload are renewal applications, and it expects a further 300 in 2025 and 2026 as approvals expire.
“Removing the requirements for renewals will promote a more proactive and dynamic approach to maintaining food and feed safety,” the FSA commented, noting that it would mean applications in the system “decrease considerably, releasing resources to focus on new marketing authorisations, including innovative products”.
The second proposal revolved around the new public register. At the moment, the parliament needs to pass statutory instruments before a novel food can go on the market, which is a time-consuming process. The FSA suggested that the removal of this step would speed up approvals by three months, allowing products to be commercialised following a ministerial decision.
Both proposals received broad support from stakeholders, which included cultivated meat startups like Mosa Meat and Meatable – 71% agreed with the plan to scrap renewal requirements, while a similar 70% were in favour of removing the statutory instrument process.
“New UK government ministers have confirmed they are content to proceed with our two initial market authorisation reform proposals to remove renewal requirements for authorised regulated products and allow authorisations to come into effect following ministerial decisions,” the FSA said. “We are now prioritising delivery of this work.”
While the FSA will continue to conduct rigorous assessments of food safety with ministers the final decision-makers, it argued that the changes will release resources to focus on new authorisations: “Consumers will benefit from new, safe products reaching the market more quickly, including novel foods and products which have sustainability and environmental benefits.”
UK government must implement ‘wider-ranging measures’
The regulator has been pushing to move past the inherited EU legislation, which it said was transferred to the UK with minor amendments for operability. It called the EU requirements “prescriptive and, in some cases, not proportionate to the risk”.
Outlining how the caseload is expected to rise from 450 in March 2024 to 570 by March 2026.” Without urgent action, we will be unable to keep pace with this growing caseload. This will affect consumers’ choice and access to new and potentially beneficial products,” it said.
The regulator has also been hoping to win government funding that it would use to create a regulatory ‘sandbox’ for the safety testing of cultivated meat. Alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe – which has welcomed the FSA’s changes – is calling on ministers to approve this bid in next month’s budget. This would ensure “the body can accelerate its understanding of the food safety aspects of cultivated meat.”
“But to send a clear signal to startups, the FSA and UK government must quickly follow these initial steps with more wide-ranging measures to modernise our regulatory system, ensuring it keeps up with the rapid pace of innovation,” said Pardoe.
“The government should implement an ambitious range of reforms to modernise the UK’s novel foods regulatory framework, such as producing clear guidance for companies planning on submitting applications for cultivated meat and precision fermentation products and formalising a process for startups to enter pre-submission consultations,” he explained.
“They should also share information about risk assessments with trusted international partners and should follow the Dutch government by designing a system for pre-market tastings, enabling companies to work closely with consumers to develop products.”
In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Alpro’s new flavoured barista milk, vegan footwear wins, and Violife’s latest marketing campaign.
New products and launches
South Korean vegan cheesemaker Armored Fresh has announced that it will release a vegan grated parmesan made from oat milk in the US this fall.
Courtesy: Alpro/Green Queen
Alpro has released a 750ml caramel-flavoured barista milk made from soy and oats in the UK, which is available at Sainsbury’s for £1.75.
Another flavoured milk comes from Mighty, which has announced a Gingerbread Oat Barista milk as part of the UK’s annual tradition of releasing Christmas-themed products from September.
In more alt-dairy news, Cathedral City has added a Plant-Based Smokey cheese block to its lineup, which will be available at Tesco soon.
Courtesy: Beyond Belief Brewing Co
Also in the UK, Beyond Belief Brewing Co, a subsidiary of pasta supplier Ugo Foods, is launching a line of beers made using waste pasta in grocery, including a Pale Ale, IPA and Vienna Lager, which will be available at Ocado for £8.50-£8.75 this month.
Barefoot shoe maker Vivobarefoot has introduced the Gobi Sneaker Premium Canvas, a Vegan Society-certified sneaker made from 98% natural materials. Instead of plastic, the brand is using a bio-based alt-leather from Natural Fiber Welding called Mirum.
In more footwear news, sheepskin boot manufacturer Ugg has announced a vegan version of its signature shoe, partnering with New York label Collina Strada. The vegan Uggs are made from recycled polyester microfibre and corn leather, and are available in the UK on both brands’ websites.
Courtesy: Stroop Club
Texas-based startup Stroop Club has rolled out its vegan stroopwafels in Europe. Using sunflower oil and cacao fats, the products are available as two- or eight-packs at Ankorstore.com and Faire.com, and on its website.
Speaking of Dutch delights, plant-based giant Vivera has launched Protein Bites in the Netherlands, described as “plant-based meal enrichers” made from vegetables, grains and legumes. The whole-food product line is available in TexMex, Thai and Green flavours, and can be found at Albert Heijn, Jumbo and Plus stores.
Courtesy: Vivera
In the US, TiNDLE Foods‘ chicken tenders are now available on the menu of AI-driven meal kit and grocery solutions platform Hungryroot.
Meanwhile, Rich Products Corporation‘s F’real has debuted the first non-dairy edition of its DIY shakes, an oat-milk-based Choco Choco Chip flavour.
Plant protein company Havredals has expanded its fava bean meats on the US east cost through a distribution partnership with Performance Food Group.
Courtesy: Havredals
And Slovenia’s Juicy Marbles is also hoping to ‘steak’ a claim in the US with a 2025 supermarket launch for its whole-cut meat analogues. It’s working on a more accessible product line to widen its customer reach.
Finance and company updates
Plant-Ex Ingredients, a British supplier of plant-derived flavours, colours and extracts has raised £9M in funding from BGF to expand internationally, with the US a key focus market.
Canadian vegan meal replacement beverage maker Sperri has attracted new funding to spur its US expansion efforts. It has just entered the D2C channel via Amazon.
Swedish investor Kale United has announced a new €50M Kale Growth Fund for alternative protein startups.
Courtesy: MeliBio
Vegan honey maker MeliBio has been granted a utility patent in Germany, which it hopes will fuel its expansion in Europe.
Meanwhile, Copenhagen-based Meat Tomorrow, which is developing pluripotent stem cell lines for cultivated meat, has raised 4.1 million kroner ($610,000) to expand R&D efforts and establish partnerships.
As election season rages on in the US, vegan cheese giant Violife has debuted a new marketing campaign dubbed America Has Voted, after its product was voted the best dairy-free cream cheese. The company will take over bagel shops on election day (November 5) and offer samples in grocery store parking lots in Austin and Miami.
Courtesy: Violife
Givaudan‘s food innovation platform MISTA has chosen biomass fermentation as the central theme for the 2024 Growth Hack event.
Research and policy developments
As US lawmakers continue to find ways to try and ban cultivated meat, a federal judge in Florida has set a date for a hearing about the state’s ban on cultivated meat. In its lawsuit, Californian startup Upside Foods asked the court for a preliminary injunction, which Chief US District Judge Mark Walker will hear arguments for on October 7.
Courtesy: Kevin Martin Galante/Upside Foods
In a new research partnership, Indian cultivated meat startup ClearMeat will join forces with Melbourne’s La Trobe University under the Indo-Australian research corridor. It was announced as ClearMeat unveiled ClearX9, an FBS-free powdered growth medium.
Also in India, the Good Food Institute India and the state-owned CSIR-Institute of Himalayan Bioresource Technology have signed a research agreement to advance the country’s alternative protein sector. The latter will provide scientific support and access to state-of-the-art labs and instrumentation facilities for GFI India’s research fellows.
If it manages to meet the taste and nutrition requirements, plant-based dairy could be 10% cheaper than cow’s milk by 2030, a new report shows.
Courtesy: William Shaw/National Trust
Finally, in the UK, conservation agency the National Trust is looking to make half of its food in cafes meatless as part of its net-zero pledge for 2030, with its 2.6 million members set to vote on the proposal. Around 40% of its current catering is plant-based.
In New Zealand, the government has poured NZ$9.6M ($5.95M) into a five-year programme to develop cultivated fish products.
A five-year, government-backed scheme is aiming to develop new fish cell production systems for cultivated seafood products in New Zealand.
The new Endeavour Fund programme is backed by a NZ$9.6M ($5.95M) grant from the central government, allowing Plant & Food Research to create novel seafood products in a local context.
Plant & Food Research is a state-owned research agency focused on futureproofing and enhancing the value of the horticulture, agriculture, fish, food and beverage industries. It noted that cultivated seafood could help New Zealand meet the global demand for more sustainable seafood and marine products (like collagen).
The project will also examine the social and cultural aspects linked with New Zealand’s acceptance of cultivated fish, including Māori perspectives and concerns with respect to taonga species (those that are significant to Māori culture, such as tuna, crayfish and mussels).
Researchers hope to create cultivated fish and collagen
Courtesy: Plant & Food Research
Plant & Food Research aims to “fundamentally change the way” cultivated fish cells are utilised to accelerate the industry’s progress, unlock new applications, and place New Zealand at the “technological forefront in cell line development and media formulation”.
The project will be led by Dr Georgina Dowd, the agency’s cellular aquaculture research lead. “There are so many applications for cell lines,” she said in 2022. “Preventing and monitoring disease is probably the biggest.”
She added: “It’s only a matter of time before one of the detrimental OIE (World Organisation for Animal Health)-notifiable diseases arrives here and impacts our seafood industry. Unless we put systems and pipelines in place, we are really at risk.”
The research agency says cells must be viable and healthy, and multiply rapidly and in large numbers, while media must be defined, animal-free and sustainably produced. Existing fish cell lines and media, it argues, don’t meet these requirements.
While several companies are working on cultivated seafood – from Singapore’s Umami Bioworks to Germany’s Bluu Seafood – nobody has been able to commercialise it yet, a marker of the “unstable foundations” of seafood cellular agriculture and the technology’s lack of commercial viability, according to Plant & Food Research.
With the millions it has received from the government, Dowd’s team hopes to expand the knowledge around fish cell cultures and generate an in-depth understanding of their nutritional needs, leading to enhanced isolation and proliferation. Once the optimal culture requirements have been identified, it can develop natural nutrient sources for two applications: cultivated fish and cell-based collagen.
“It would be great if others could use continuous fish cell lines developed at Plant & Food Research as part of a fish health management strategy that doesn’t involve using whole animals,” Dowd said two years ago. “Or if our cell lines could be used to create lab-grown fish products for human consumption. They could help support a low-impact industry to share our kaimoana with the world.”
Why New Zealand’s seafood sector needs an overhaul
Courtesy: Kim Westerskov
The Plant & Food Research grant is part of the Endeavour Fund, an initiative by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment that has poured in NZ$236M ($146M) this year alone in 19 research programmes and 53 Smart Ideas, which aim to catalyse and test high-potential research innovations.
This included four Smart Idea projects from Plant & Food Research. One is focusing on developing methods for examining soil vulnerability to support sustainable soil management practices, another is looking into the microbiome of vineyards to control grapevine trunk diseases.
Yet another is centred upon investigating if silvervine compounds (a kiwi fruit species) can be used to control feral cat populations. And finally, one of these Smart Idea projects is aimed at developing an epigenetic clock to support the sustainable management of pāua (sea snails) fisheries.
New Zealand’s aquaculture industry is hoping to quadruple sales by 2035, but climate change and rising sea temperatures could result in the loss of millions for the sector. Experts suggest that the impact of overfishing on the country’s fishing trade has been understated.
Just last year, the country’s bottom-trawling industry came under fire after a government-commissioned report focused on the seabed around Aotearoa named the practice one of the biggest threats to releasing carbon from the seabed back into ocean waters. Concerns over stock management also led Seafood NZ to suspend the Marine Stewardship Council certification for orange roughy, blocking exports of the fish to most parts of Europe and North America.
Consumers recognise the impact of climate change on the fishing industry, and vice-versa. A recent 22,000-person global survey found that 30% of people have been eating less seafood in the last two years, with nearly half (48%) concerned about overfishing and 35% worried about climate change impacts.
Over 80% of people have changed their dietary habits in this period, and 43% are doing so for sustainability reasons, highlighting the importance of investments in projects like Plant & Food Research is undertaking.
It’s also an untapped market in New Zealand – only one local company (Opo Bio) is working on cultivated meat, but it focuses on red meat. That said, New Zealanders may be about to get a first taste of cultivated meat, with Australian startup Vow on the verge of receiving clearance from the countries’ joint regulator.
Israeli cultivated meat pioneer Aleph Farms is gearing up for the restaurant launch of its beef steaks through a partnership with Michelin-starred chef Eyal Shani.
At the tail-end of last year, Aleph Farms became the third company to receive regulatory approval for cultivated meat anywhere in the world, with Israel clearing its Black Angus Petit Steak for sale in the country.
Now, nine months on, the launch of the product – under its Aleph Cuts line – is closer than ever, thanks to a collaboration with Eyal Shani, the celebrity chef behind the restaurant chain Miznon.
“Together with Eyal Shani, we will debut Aleph Cuts through a series of thoughtfully curated dining experiences in Israel,” an Aleph Farms spokesperson told Green Queen.
Shani is joining the company as an investor and launch partner, helping it introduce its cultivated beef via roaming dining experiences. But it remains to be seen which of Shani’s eateries debuts the product, and when.
“Eyal’s dedication to using the finest ingredients and raw materials elevates our new category of animal products, ensuring that it is not only sustainable but also of exceptional quality,” said Aleph Farms co-founder and CEO Didier Toubia. “His innovative spirit and focus on connecting people through food make him an invaluable partner as we launch Aleph Cuts globally.”
Eyal Shani makes the argument for cultivated meat
Courtesy: Aleph Farms
A self-proclaimed “re-enchanter” of Israeli cuisine, Shani owns 17 restaurants in Tel Aviv alone, and a total of around 50 globally, from Port Said and Romano to HaSalon. His culinary footprint is spread across the world, including the US, the UK, France, Singapore and Australia. And Shmoné, his New York City eatery, won a Michelin star last year.
“I was born into a vegan family and, until the age of five, was fed only plants and roots. Almost 60 years have passed and today, I have over 50 restaurants across six continents, and I serve meat in all of them. I ask myself constantly: what am I bequeathing to the world?” said Shani.
“Aleph Farms has given me the opportunity to bequeath a future that avoids causing suffering to billions of animals, in which people will be one with nature and not harm it, in which Aleph Cuts are more wonderful than the meat we know today and is so without killing a single animal, and in which our happiness does not require that the animals with which we share the world feel pain,” he added.
The Petit Steak is a hybrid meat product comprising non-modified, non-immortalised cells of a premium Black Angus cow, combined with a plant protein matrix made of soy and wheat. It will be priced similarly to premium beef, the company confirmed.
Before it launches, though, Aleph Farms needs to clear some regulatory hurdles, including the Good Manufacturing Practices assessment for its production plant. “We still need to do the GMP inspection for our pilot facility in Israel and follow the labelling guidelines in Israel before launching with Eyal Shani,” the spokesperson said.
“Before Aleph Cuts become a staple on restaurant menus, it’s important for us to receive feedback from consumers in the initial phase of our launch,” they added. Aleph Farms has previously outlined a long-term goal of making its cultivated beef available in supermarkets.
Aleph Farms in ‘active discussions’ with investors
Courtesy: Aleph Farms
The partnership with Shani comes months after Aleph Farms laid off 30% of its local employees as part of its “asset-light” approach towards scaling up. “We are maintaining R&D and production in Israel while expanding globally through co-manufacturers,” the firm said at the time. “We care for all affected employees and will be supporting them in the new job search.”
There were suggestions that difficulties in securing fresh capital also played a part in the decision. Aleph Farms has raised $118M in funding so far, with its last round coming in 2022. But the wider fundraising struggles of alternative protein and the geopolitical tension with the Israel-Hamas war have impeded its efforts to secure more money.
“We are in active discussions with potential investors who are aligned with our mission,” the spokesperson said, highlighting that the recent changes have been “challenging” but in line with its “capital-efficient, asset-light scale-up approach”.
“Our primary operational focus is on enhancing robust scale-up capabilities for our production process at our pilot production facility in Israel, as well as in Southeast Asia with our partners – a pivotal region for our hub-and-spoke expansion strategy,” they added.
Aside from its pilot plant in Rehovot, Israel, Aleph Farms has entered a partnership to produce cultivated meat in Thailand, and teamed up with a biotech startup to leverage AI to reduce costs and enable scalability. It has previously also acquired a manufacturing facility in Modi’in, and signed a deal with ESCO Aster in Singapore (the world’s first approved industrial manufacturer for cultivated meat).
The startup has additionally filed for regulatory approval in Singapore, Switzerland, the UK and the US, and is looking to do so in other markets too. “Our team has been advancing our regulatory paths towards launch in various countries while responding to queries and submitting data to authorities worldwide,” the representative said.
Following Israel, the company is planning launches in Singapore and Thailand, before expanding into Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, China and Australia. “We want to ensure that we first build the right production and sales support capabilities to ensure steady supply over time, and continuous revenue increase for a successful launch of our products.”
The culture wars over cultivated meat continue, with a House Representative in Illinois introducing a bill to ban these foods in the state.
And it goes on.
Two months after Florida’s ban on cultivated meat came into effect, and a month before one goes live in Alabama, Illinois has joined a number of other states to try and outlaw these proteins.
House Representative Chris Miller, a third-generation cattle farmer, has introduced HB 5872, a bill to make the sale, manufacture or distribution of cultivated meat a Class C misdemeanour.
It means that if you sell cultivated meat, you’ll be treated the same way as you would if you possessed less than 2.5g of marijuana, assaulted someone, or left a firearm in your house that could easily be accessed by a minor. The penalty can result in 30 days of jail time, and/or $1,500 in fines.
“Agriculture is big business in Illinois, and we don’t need fake meat laboratories creating a highly expensive product that tries to replicate real meat,” said Miller. “Illinois farmers know what they’re doing, and they do it well.”
Rep Miller relies on misinformation to back bill
Courtesy: Representative Chris Miller/Facebook
Miller’s bill, which hasn’t been referred to any of the committees yet, calls cultivated meat “a threat to the health, safety, and welfare” of Illinois residents.
A press release on the Representative’s website explains that HB 5872 was introduced as a response to “growing concerns from the notion of replacing real meat with laboratories”, and argued that it would protect “individual’s health, farmland, and agricultural products”.
Let’s break that down. First, cultivated meat poses no health risks – if it did, the USDA and the FDA wouldn’t have deemed it safe to be sold for human consumption, as they did for Upside Foods’ and Eat Just’s chicken products last year. In fact, cultivated meat takes away any concerns about antibiotics or bacterial contamination (like E coli).
Next, to make cultivated meat, you need sugars, minerals, and other inputs, which are agricultural products. Andy Jarvis, director of the Bezos Earth Fund’s Future of Food initiative, told Green Queen in June: “This is not an anti-farmer sector; this is a sector that is using farmed products in new ways.”
And finally, the claim that this is a threat to farmland is laughable at best – research has shown that if produced by renewable energy, cultivated meat uses 90% less land than conventional beef. It has also been found to be three times more efficient at turning crops into meat than even the “most efficient” livestock.
“The ideology behind cultivating animal cells to improve carbon emissions is mind-blowing,” said Miller, with complete disregard for the misinformation he was spewing. Explaining how cultivated meat is made, his announcement took inspiration from an account of Upside Foods’ process by Wired. The publication revealed that instead of producing its meat in bioreactors, the Californian startup was at the time primarily relying on plastic roller bottles.
Miller, however, contorted the two to say that cultivated meat is produced in bioreactors, and employees “grow sheets of tissue in plastic flasks, called roller bottles, and combine them to create larger pieces of chicken or beef”. He’s also using one company’s process as a yardstick for the entire industry.
It highlights a startling reality: policymakers are trying to suppress consumer choice by outlawing food without actually knowing how it’s truly made. Alabama’s bill was also similarly built on misinformation.
It’s all about politics
Courtesy: Upside Foods
“Here in Illinois, farmers work hard to raise cattle and produce some of the finest meat on the market,” said Miller. In January alone, a local company recalled nearly 7,000 lbs of raw ground beef thought to be contaminated with E. coli.
“My legislation would protect farmers and the high-quality products they help produce to feed families across the nation,” Miller added, regurgitating an argument made by almost everyone who’s tried to ban cultivated meat.
Legal challenges against cultivated meat have become a trend in the US, particularly among Republicans. But for all the talk about protecting the state’s animal agriculture industry, most of these efforts come from legislators who themselves are livestock farmers, or belong to a family of meat producers. So really, they’re looking out for themselves.
Only last week, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen signed an executive order prohibiting state agencies from procuring cultivated meat, ordering contractors to not discriminate against conventional meat producers, and calling for restrictions on how cultivated meat is labelled in stores – despite it never appearing on any supermarket shelf in the US.
Pillen, part of a pork family empire in Nebraska, now wants to ban cultivated meat in the 2025 legislative session. Similar efforts are ongoing in Arizona, Kentucky, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia.
Illinois was set to be the site for Upside Foods’ industrial-scale manufacturing plant before the project was put on pause. But now, the company has sued Florida for its ban, calling it unconstitutional. Whether such pushback would deter Miller – who has previously been censured by his colleagues for attending Donald Trump’s rally that preceded January 6 – only time will tell.
But as November 5 draws closer, Donald Trump incoherently tries to talk about plant-based bacon, and his running mate JD Vance denounces ‘soy boys’, the Republican strategy seems to be clear: nothing is more American than red meat, no matter how bad it is for you or the planet.
Let’s cut the crap and call these bans what they really are: political stunts hoping to sway voters with misinformation and no regard for their own freedom to choose what they eat.
Nebraska governor Jim Pillen has signed an executive order with a view to ban cultivated meat in 2025 – and he did not mince his words about consumers’ freedom of choice, or Bill Gates.
Despite Ron DeSantis’ Florida being sued for banning cultivated meat, his Nebraskan counterpart remains unfazed, initiating a “a full-blown attack on lab-grown meats and fake meat”.
Those are governor Jim Pillen’s words, after signing an executive order putting several restrictions on cultivated meat, and has announced his intention to ban these products in the next legislative session in 2025.
At Oak Barn Beef, a family-owned meat shop in West Point, the governor was flanked by the owner of the store, a livestock farmer running for office, and the head of the state’s agricultural department (whose family owns a beef farm), when he approved three measures to protect animal agriculture from the “extraordinary, crazy views out there that there’s going to be different ways to feed the planet”.
And he took a jibe at Bill Gates, who has invested in a number of alternative protein companies, including California’s Upside Foods, the plaintiff in the lawsuit against Florida. “There’s a guy that made some money in building computers. He needs to stay in the computer space and knock this stuff off thinking that he’s going to promote lab-grown meat. He’s lost his brains,” said Pillen.
“We’re being proactive and making sure that silly things aren’t happening, because they are happening on the coasts,” Pillen added. Until a few months ago, two restaurants – one on each coast – were serving cultivated meat, after Upside Foods and fellow Californian startup Eat Just received approval from the USDA and FDA.
The governor, whose family owns a major pork farm in the state, was very forceful in his wording. “If there are Nebraskans that want to buy lab-grown meat, good for them. They’re just not going to do it in Nebraska,” he said.
Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen received and signed the executive order yesterday, which means it is now in effect.
How Nebraska’s executive order stifles cultivated meat
Courtesy: Governor Jim Pillen/X
Pillen announced three separate measures to block the progress of the cultivated meat industry. First, he has prohibited state agencies from procuring these proteins
Then, he has mandated state contractors to ensure they don’t “discriminate against natural-meat producers” in favour of alternative proteins.
And finally, he’s asked the agriculture department to make a rule that requires any cultivated meat sold in stores to be clearly labelled separately and placed away from what he called “real meat”. For the record, cultivated meat uses cells from real animals, so it is ‘real meat’ – just, you know, without the slaughter and the pollution and the land use and the water consumption.
Sherry Vinton, the aforementioned director of the agriculture department, said her agency will develop standards to determine when alternative proteins – including plant-based meats – are being falsely labelled or misadvertised. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
“Without these regulations, people can be misled, they can be deceived into buying a product that they didn’t intend on buying,” she said. Some would say that’s insulting people’s intelligence.
“We are going to get very aggressive and make sure Nebraskans are not going to get confused by how meat is labelled,” Pillen said. “People are not going to be able to come into Nebraska and sell product that has meat on it that’s not meat.”
The executive order suggested that blended meats – which combine conventionally raised meat with plant-based ingredients or cultivated cells – “have the potential to confuse consumers”.
But to the contrary, peer-reviewed research has shown that when produced using renewable energy, cultivated meat can account for 92% fewer emissions, 94% less air pollution, and 90% less land use than conventional beef. Another study estimated that a shift to cellular agriculture combined with green energy could cut annual emissions by 52% and reduce the amount of land used by traditional farming methods by 83%.
A familiar – and tired – rhetoric
Courtesy: EPA
Pillen said that 95% of livestock producers in Nebraska are family-owned, and that he wants to keep it that way. This is the same rhetoric used by DeSantis as well as Alabama governor Kay Ivey, whose state has also banned cultivated meat (which will come into effect on October 1).
The Nebraska governor aims to follow in his fellow Republicans’ footsteps. He promised to reciprocate this legislation in his state in May – when the bans by Florida and Alabama were announced.
“The fake-meat, petri-dish-meat folks, they’re not going to have a place in Nebraska, just mark that down on your calendar,” he said at the time. “It’s time for us to roll up our sleeves and fight and defend Nebraska, and that’s what we’re doing.”
Yesterday, Pillen said he’ll ask policymakers to propose and prioritise a ban on cultivated meat next year. “We can etch it in stone so nobody has a chance,” he suggested, calling these proteins “an attack on our values”.
“We are the beef state,” he added. The problem is, agriculture is the largest source of Nebraska’s emissions, contributing to 42% of the state’s climate footprint, according to the US EPA. And beef production alone accounts for 55% of this share, and 23.7% of the state’s overall emissions.
That seemingly doesn’t faze Pillen. “Nebraska farmers and ranchers, like those here today, are committed to producing the best food products anywhere,” he said. “We feed the world, and we save the planet more effectively and more efficiently than anybody else, and I will defend those practices with my last breath.”
But this idea that cultivated meat is a threat to farmers is a fallacy. As Andy Jarvis, director of the Bezos Earth Fund’s Future of Food scheme, told Green Queen in June: “Everyone gets kind of very nervous about cultivated [meat]… thinking that it’s completely detached from farming. Well, the [culture] media are sugars, and all sorts of minerals and things that are coming from crops, and they’re farmed goods.”
He added: “So this is not an anti-farmer sector; this is a sector that is using farmed products in new ways. And generally using farmed products that are more profitable and highly sustainable in the way they’re produced.”
Nebraska leaders miss the irony
Courtesy: Jim Pillen for Governor
Lawmakers in Arizona, Kentucky, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia have all introduced similar proposals to thwart cultivated meat. As Upside Foods CEO Uma Valeti put it, these types of bans are “a harbinger of what might come when a small set of people try to make laws and rules” on what Americans can eat.
So it makes it even more depressingly funny that Jeanne Reigle, the legislative candidate supporting Pillen at the signing, said – completely unironically – that what keeps her up at night and makes her fear for American children’s future is that the “government could get involved and have more control over this new so-called ‘food’”.
As for Pillen, it’s unclear whether he really feels so deeply about this issue, or it’s more a PR stunt – after all, it’s become almost fashionable in Republican states to restrict new businesses hoping to find a way to feed America when meat inevitably goes into short supply. Given Republicans’ staggering lack of belief in climate change or willingness to embrace cultivated meat, this is nothing new.
But the Nebaraska governor wants it to be. He wants you to know that this is “a big deal”. Whether a ban actually happens – or any such bills die down eventually – only time will tell.
Should Pillen really be focusing on products that have never been sold in Nebraska and wouldn’t have for quite a few years anyway? Or should he be putting his energy into reducing the dangerously high nitrate levels in his hog farm’s water supply, which would also protect the health of the farmers and consumers he says he cares about?
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