There have been a host of developments in the cultivated pet food sector of late, headlined by Czech startup Bene Meat Technologies earning the first EU regulatory approval for the use of cultured meat in pet food.
Prague-based Bene Meat has become the EU’s first cultivated meat company to be cleared for sale in pet food after receiving approval from the European Feed Materials Register. The milestone is the latest development in the burgeoning cultured pet food sector, which has witnessed new tech, new brands, as well as rebrands.
Bene Meat becomes the first to receive EU regulatory approval
Courtesy: Bene Meat Technologies
The Czech startup was founded in 2020 to make cultivated meat for human consumption but has pivoted to pet food for now, providing cultured meat as a raw material to global pet food manufacturers. It has been developing its own FBS-free growth factors since 2021, and now plans to boost production to produce several tonnes of cell-cultured meat daily by mid-2024.
“Thanks to the obtained certification, nothing prevents us from taking further steps,” said Tomáš Kubeš, Bene Meat’s head of strategic projects. “We’re negotiating with feed manufacturers to get this wonderful product into production.” Its tech can be adapted according to manufacturers’ requirements, offering an ingredient that can be fully used in the making of any pet food product.
“We look forward to working with manufacturers, as we’re doing it for them and their customers,” added managing director Roman Kříž. “Manufacturers have a unique chance to gain an unprecedented competitive advantage in the market, thanks to the existence of our product.”
Kříž told Reuters that Bene Meat is the first company globally “that has an official authorisation for the production and sale of cultivated meat for cats and dogs”. He added that the startup is able to scale up its manufacturing at prices that make its meat commercially viable on par with premium and super-premium pet food products.
Bene Meat is emerging in a market with strong acceptance of cell-cultured pet food. A Czech survey by NMS Market Research found that 48% of citizens prefer cultivated meat in pet food for health and safety reasons, while 27% cited ethical and ecological factors as purchasing drivers for cultured meat for their furry friends.
The startup now plans to test how the meat tastes to pets, and will scale up production in its Prague lab as well as a new facility it’s on the lookout for. Bene Meat expects to introduce the first cultured meat for pet food in the EU in early 2024.
Meatly takes on the UK
Courtesy: Meatly
Another company planning to launch cultivated pet food in Europe – starting with its home market in the UK – is Meatly. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s because this is the new name of the startup formerly known as Good Dog Food.
The company, which raised £3.5M in seed funding earlier this year, has just rebranded as it prepares to launch in the UK. Its chairman Jim Melon, executive director of Agronomics – who created the startup in collaboration with Roslin Technologies – has previously said that it would be easier to earn regulatory approval for cultured meat for the pet industry, rather than for human consumption.
Meatly was only launched last year, and makes cultivated chicken by “taking a sample of cells from a chicken egg just once”. It has already secured “key partnerships with manufacturers” – including with petcare retailer Pets at Home – to get its pet food on shelves soon.
“Our pets love meat, but old-fashioned meat – produced through factory farming – requires a huge amount of land, water, and antibiotics and is a key cause of environmental degradation,” said Meatly CEO Owen Ensor. “We need cultivated meat now more than ever. Pet food is the natural starting point, given consumers’ excitement. We’re thrilled to be at the heart of the future of meat production in the UK.”
A kinder seafood brand for pets
Courtesy: Marina Cat
More recent developments include the formation of Marina Cat, a cultivated pet food brand born out of a collaboration between Canada’s Cult Food Science and Singapore-based cultured seafood producer Umami Bioworks.
Marina Cat will combine Umami’s cultivated red ocean snapper and Cult’s patented nutritional yeast ingredient, Bmmune, to make a “high-protein, low-calorie” feline treat that “provides benefits to a cat’s cognitive function, based on its high levels of omega 3, 6 and 9 fatty acid chains”.
The startup aims to begin production this year, and expects its product to have widespread availability in 2024. “My vision for the future is that we no longer have to slaughter other animals to feed our cats,” said Joshua Errett, Cult’s VP of product. “This brand brings me one very great step closer to making that a reality.”
The AI opportunity
Courtesy: BioCraft Pet Nutrition
More recently, Vienna-based BioCraft Pet Nutrition (formerly Because Animals) unveiled its proprietary AI and machine learning tool to accelerate R&D for optimal cell proliferation and nutrient production. The tool processes publicly available data and synthesises it into “a picture of the biochemical machinery inside a cell”. It then analyses the data to identify nutritional inputs that can enhance cell growth, nutrient biosynthesis, or other biological processes key to cultivated meat production.
“The main costs and time sinks on the way to commercialization are R&D-related, and our AI has substantially streamlined this process, accelerated our progress, and reduced costs,” said BioCraft founder and CEO Shannon Falconer. “In this application, AI can surpass the human brain for speed and efficiency, and helps us derive more complex conclusions by making more connections between more facts.”
This came a few months after BioCraft had developed a chicken cell line for both cat and dog food, with the cultured chicken ingredient containing all essential nutrients found in conventional pet food, including high protein content, key vitamins, fats and amino acids like taurine.
With the help of AI, BioCraft – which has previously unveiled cell-based mice meat – is engaging in fewer, more targeted experiments, to fine-tune its cell proliferation process and improve the health credentials of its meat. Additionally, it can identify less expensive inputs and ingredients, including those less likely to raise regulatory concerns. (So far, no company has received approval from the US Centre for Veterinary Medicine.)
Why alternative pet food is crucial
Courtesy: Bene Meat Technologies
Pet food is a $144B market and one that’s set to grow annually by 5.3% until 2028. But the industry carries a massive environmental burden. In the US alone, for example, manufacturing cat and dog kibble is equivalent to 25-30% of all animal-consumption-related emissions. And globally, dog and cat food emit around 64 million tons of carbon per year – that’s the equivalent of over 13 million cars.
In fact, according to one study, if cats and dogs were considered their own nation, they would rank as the world’s fifth-largest meat-consuming entity. Moreover, health is an increasing priority for humans, and the continued humanisation of pets has led to a crossover of habits.
This is where cultured pet food comes in. A 729-person study last year found that while 32.5% of Brits would be willing to eat cultivated meat themselves, they’d be more willing to feed it to their pets (47.3%). Of those who would try these proteins themselves, 81.4% would be happy to give them to their four-legged friends.
A recent study exploring the environmental impact of vegan pets can provide an insight into the climate-friendly nature of cultured pet food too. The research suggested that if all dogs and cats went plant-based globally, it could help feed nearly 520 million people, save more greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to those produced by entire nations, and free up land the size of several countries.
Further research found that vegan diets can be just as healthy for cats as meat-based ones, shedding the ‘obligate carnivores’ universally associated with felines. It followed another study published last year that found that vegan diets are the healthiest and least hazardous choice for dogs.
In fact, vegan cat food is a $9.2B market that’s expected to nearly double by 2030, while the vegan dog food market is currently valued at £11.5bn ($14.1B), and projected to reach £21bn ($25.8B) by 2033, according to the Guardian.
All the signs are there for the continued growth of alternative pet food, a category that also includes brands like Wild Earth (cell-based dog food) and Bond Pet Foods (cultured chicken for dogs and cats). These latest developments – notably the approval in the EU – are major markers of what’s to come for this sector.
Nūmi, a French startup making breast milk from cell-cultured mammary glands, has raised €3M in pre-seed funding to expand its R&D and recruit new scientists. It plans to file for regulatory approval in the US first, followed by Europe and Asia.
Founded in 2022 by duo Eugénie Pezé-Heidsieck and Eden Banon-Lagrange, Nūmi makes cultivated breast milk using mammary gland cell cultures, in a process it claims “strictly imitates the phenomenon already at work in women’s bodies”. The startup recreates the optimal environment for the development of mammary glands and feeds them with essential nutrients to produce breast milk for infants.
Its €3M pre-seed funding round included support from Heartcore Capital, HCVC, Financière Saint-James, Kima Ventures and Kost Capital. “We are passionate advocates for transformative innovation at the nexus of health and food manufacturing,” said Alexis Hossou, founder and managing partner of HCVC. “Nūmi stands as a prime example of this, with their technology poised to revolutionise accessibility to breastmilk for millions of women globally and advance human health in unprecedented ways.”
Pezé-Heidsieck, Nūmi’s chief technology officer, said the investment will enable the startup to “recruit the best talents for this ambitious project”. In addition to expanding its scientific team, the company aims to use the new funds to further its R&D capabilities and make progress toward regulatory approval and commercialisation.
Keeping its cultivated cards close to the chest
Courtesy: Nūmi
Nūmi, which was formerly called MUMilk, argues that current substitutes to breast milk – mainly based on cow’s milk – aren’t “nutritionally suited to the growth of infants”. Plus, many babies are intolerant to proteins found in dairy, which can further complicate things. The company says that breast milk’s unique composition means it can boost immunity, regulate metabolism, and aid in brain development.
About 5-10% of women are physiologically unable to breastfeed, but many more say they’re not producing enough or have nutritional deficiencies in their milk. In the US, less than half of women continue to exclusively breastfeed after three months, and only a quarter keep doing so at six months, which is the recommended period by the American Academy of Pediatrics.
In 2019, a study of 552 mothers found that about 70% experienced breastfeeding difficulties (mostly within the first month) like “cracked nipples, perception of insufficient amount of milk, pain and fatigue”. Many women also choose not to breastfeed, and Nūmi hopes to cater to all these mothers with its tech, providing them with a solution that is “as close as possible” to human breast milk.
According to the team, breast milk comprises over 1,500 constituents and Nūmi is looking to replicate as many of these as it can. While some alternative breast milk startups have initially focused on specific proteins – for example, Israel’s Wilk makes cell-cultured lactoferrin and Helaina produces a precision-fermented version of the same – Pezé-Heidsieck told Green Queen Nūmi is “working towards reproducing as many constituents of breast milk as possible, including different proteins”.
Pezé-Heidsieck declined to disclose specifics about which exact proteins the company is working on, the formulation or the composition of the rest of the milk, or whether the cultivated proteins would be complemented by plant-based ingredients. The company remains tight-lipped on a number of matters as it navigates a “key stage of development”. While Pezé-Heidsieck confirmed that Nūmi has developed different sourcing strategies to develop its cell lines, she didn’t go into detail here either.
Aiming for US regulatory approval before global expansion
Co-founders Eden Banon-Lagrange (L) and and Eugénie Pezé-Heidsieck (R); courtesy: Nūmi
Before it’s ready for infant use, Nūmi’s breast milk needs to be purified. “Dowstream processing to harvest and purity our cultivated breast milk is a key step of our R&D. We have developed different strategies to best purify breast milk and its constituents,” Pezé-Heidsieck revealed, but added: “It constitutes part of our intellectual property, and until we have filed our patents, we can’t share more information.”
CEO Banon-Lagrange said the team has “enthusiastic first results in our lab”, but can’t share a comparison with conventional breast milk at the moment. “Our goal using cell culture techniques is to bring as many high-value constituents of breast milk, accessible to all,” she added.
But one thing Nūmi was happy to talk about was its go-to-market plans. “The US is our first target market as they have developed a clear regulatory framework for innovations like ours,” said Banon-Lagrange. “We believe Europe will follow and would like to make our product accessible to European families as well as soon as possible.”
While the US will be the first country Nūmi will file for regulatory approval in, the CEO hinted at further expansion past North America and Europe: “We believe the Asian market will be an interesting opportunity for us.”
The idea is to become a trailblazer in this space across the globe. “The support of major investors in new technologies supports our ambition to become a leader in this sector,” noted Banon-Lagrange. “All families want to give their children the best: we want to help them achieve this, thanks to science.”
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 an upcycled pasta partnership at Cambridge, the UK getting into Christmas mode, and anti-dairy advertising that’s sure to ruffle some feathers.
New products and launches
Happy World Vegan Day (and Month)! To kick it off, upcycled food producerThe Supplant Company is putting its Grain & Stalk Flour pasta on the catering menus of the University of Cambridge – a sweet homecoming for the brand that has its roots in the Department of Biochemistry, where founder Tom Simmons was a research scientist. Magdalene College will be subbing regular pasta for Supplant’s in a vegetarian mac and cheese and a meat-based carbonara, starting tomorrow.
Speaking of carbonara, Finnish ready meals brand REBL Eats has partnered with French vegan bacon brand La Vie to launch a ready-to-eat plant-based carbonara featuring the latter’s lardons at Kesko K-Group stores in Finland.
In more bacon news, Spanish companies Foodys and Cocuus have launched a 3D-printed vegan bacon SKU. It will be available in 120g packs at Carrefour fridges in the country starting this month.
Fellow Spanish brand NuVeg, meanwhile, is marking World Vegan Day by officially launching today with a range of dehydrated vegan dishes. Think vegan eggs, chicken curry, crepes, protein broth and bolognese.
In the US, meanwhile, New York-based vegan Italian restaurant Coletta is now servingOshi‘s 3D-printed salmon in a limited-edition Seared Balsamic Salmon dish with vegan parmesan, chive polenta, thyme-roasted broccoli and lemon.
Courtesy: Daiya
Also in New York’s plant-based Italian scene, Daiyaopened the Slice Club, a vegan pizza slice pop-up at the Two Boots in the West Village last Friday, serving free pizza to 500 customers. It will bring the concept to other US cities in the future.
If you’re looking got more vegan fast food, Canada’s Odd Burger has entered retail with a line of burgers, sausages and fillets featuring beef, pork and chicken analogues. They can be found at all Odd Burger locations, as well as stores in Toronto, London (Ontario), Hamilton and Kitchener.
Elsewhere, in Malaysia, retail and foodservice operator Berjaya Food has announced an expansion of its vegan offering across its sites. The company operates all Starbucks stores in the country, as well as a vegan Latin American restaurant and two alt-dairy brands.
If you’re in the UK, you might be familiar with the immediate post-Halloween Christmas craze. It has already begun, starting with its largest supermarket Tescounveiling its Christmas 2023 range, which features a bunch of vegan products. There’s Butternut Wellington, Battered Bangers with Curry Sauce, Mushroom and Chestnut Festive Wreath, Stem Ginger Tiffin Crackers and two roast turkey SKUs.
Courtesy: Tesco
Then there’s the Upfield-owned cream brand Elmlea, which has launched a brandy-flavoured vegan cream made from lentil protein and vegetable oils. But it doesn’t contain any booze, so anyone can have it.
And vegan deli meat maker Shocken Foods will release its plant-based foie gras, ‘nduja and meatballs in time for Christmas. The brand was co-founded by Emma Bowe, a former chef at Heston Blumenthal’s Mandarin Oriental restaurant.
Funding, manufacturing and finance news
German vegan seafood maker Happy Ocean Foods, which makes products like plant-based tuna, seafood and shrimp, has raised €1.5M in a seed funding round from Companisto.
WebrestaurantStore, an online foodservice retailer in the US, has reported a 110% year-on-year growth ($3B) in revenue in 2022, with plant-based consumables a key growth factor.
Cellular agriculture as a category has raised double the investments of Q3 2023 within the first few weeks of Q4. While a total of $40.2M was raised in Q3, five fundings disclosed this quarter have amounted to $81.5M, including Eden Brew, Bon Vivant and BlueNalu.
Meanwhile, the chicken nugget market is expected to grow by 12% annually by 2029, and the snack bars segment is set to surpass $16.5B by 2032. And the global plant-based milk sector is anticipated to expand annually by 6.38% to 2028.
Courtesy: Jumbo
In the Netherlands, supermarket chain Jumbo has committed to make 60% of all its protein offerings plant-based by 2030, with plans to expand its Lekker Veggie vegan brand in 2024.
Former Impossible Foods executive Don DiMasi has joined Californian food tech company Yali Bio as a senior VP for engineering and biomanufacturing. The company engineers precision-fermented lipids and fats for the plant-based industry.
Aussie startup Nourish Ingredients, meanwhile, which creates animal-like fats for plant proteins, has expanded its manufacturing processes to Singapore, joining hands with ScaleUp Bio, a joint venture between Temasek-owned Nurasa and ingredients giant ADM.
However, ADM has “re-scoped” its plant protein investment in its Decatur, Illinois facility in the US to “better match” the weakening demand for meat alternatives and an explosion at its West plant.
Also in Illinois, the Illinois Fermentation and Agriculture Biomanufacturing Hub, which works on precision fermentation crops like soy and corn, was named as one of 31 new Regional Innovation and Technology Hubs by the Biden-Harris administration.
Courtesy: Illinois Fermentation and Agriculture Biomanufacturing Hub
Elsewhere, German equipment manufacturer Bühler says it will open five application and training centres in Switzerland, two of which will complement its plant-based protein processing infrastructure.
In the US, two women-owned startups, Taimat Scienses and Biomilq, have collaborated on a project to show how a plant-based recombinant protein can be just as effective as its commercially available alternative, and 10 times more affordable.
Policy, research and events
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has updated its labelling policies on meat alternatives, clarifying that substitutes that don’t have the appearance of conventional meat don’t need to be labelled as ‘simulated’, and terms like ‘veggie burger’ and ‘soy sausage’ are fair game.
In the UK, Adfree Cities – a group challenging corporate outdoor advertising – is calling for a ban on meat advertising in the UK, arguing that it should be prohibited just as tobacco commercials were for their detrimental effects. The campaign is called The Cows Aren’t Laughing.
Courtesy: Switch4Good
The US is seeing a similar rhetoric played out. Switch4Good, the dairy-free advocacy group founded by Olympian Dotsie Bausch, has launched a Killer Milk billboard ad campaign, citing a 2021 study revealing that cow’s milk is the “leading cause of fatal anaphylaxis among school children”.
Along the same lines, Bausch joined two other women – Marielle Williamson and Yen Ang – to support the ADD SOY Act (Addressing Digestive Distress in Stomachs of our Youth) proposed by four senators to give schoolchildren a dairy-free snack choice.
In Germany, Europe’s leading vegan market, a study by sustainable food advocacy group ProVeg International has revealed that plant-based food is approaching price parity, with the cost difference between vegan and conventional products dropping from 53% to 25% in one year. Recently, supermarkets Lidl and Kaufland announced they were matching the cost of plant-based alternatives to their animal-derived counterparts.
New research by Burger King and The Vegetarian Butcher has found that 73% of Brits would choose meat over plant-based options if given the choice, with 48% citing taste as the major reason. Nearly three in 10 (30%) say they want to live a flexitarian lifestyle.
Courtesy: Burger King
In event news, VegFest UK is taking place this month in London (November 18-19). The conference will play host to Vegan Business Tribe Live, which will see speakers from leading plant-based brands in the UK, including THIS, One Planet Pizza, and Better Nature.
Finally, with another round of Veganuary fast approaching, a six-month survey found that 28% of the participants who responded stuck to a plant-based diet post-January, while 52% claimed to have reduced animal product consumption by 50% or higher. It comes a week after the campaign launched a trailer for its upcoming documentary.
Two projects funded by the European Space Agency have looked at the viability of producing cultivated meat in space to provide more sustainable food for astronauts. The results are promising.
There is so much regulatory red tape around cell-cultured meat, it’s hard to know which country will follow Singapore and the US to allow people to try cultivated meat. It almost feels like the next best option would be to just disregard all countries and focus on another sphere altogether.
Past the exosphere, that is. Two research projects in the UK and Germany, supported by the European Space Agency (ESA), have been looking into ways to make cultivated meat in space. The two teams – made up of German company Yuri and Reutlingen University, and UK firms Kayser Space, Cellular Agriculture and Campden BR – have found promising results for astronauts.
Courtesy: European Space Agency
Cultivating potential for future meat
The idea is that cultivated meat can provide an opportunity to produce fresh and familiar food products in situ. Typically, packaged supplies have a shelf life of two years, which makes them unsuitable for astronauts needing nutritious food on longer-term projects, explains ESA engineer Paolo Corradi. “Given the limited resources in space, growing fresh food in situ would be necessary to increase the resilience and self-sufficiency of a mission, and could also provide psychological support to the crew,” he says.
The British and German teams worked independently and compared existing plant- or algae-based protein alternatives in space with cultured meat in terms of nutritional value. Both came up with different production methods and bioreactor technologies. “After their analysis, both teams have come to similar conclusions and suggest that the idea of producing cultivated meat in space is not far-fetched and calls for further research,” says Corradi.
ESA is additionally developing tech that enhances bioprocesses and metabolic resources onboard spacecrafts, which could help with the cultured meat project. “ESA is investing significant efforts in researching advanced life support systems,” says Christel Paille, an ESA life support engineer and member of its cultivated meat team.
“We are creating ground prototypes to investigate, for instance, closed-loop systems that recover nutrients and recycle metabolic wastes. This could also be applied to cultivated meat production to recover the nutrient medium that we give to the cells.”
The agency adds that there’s still a lot of work to be done before astronauts can begin eating cultured meat. “It’s something that is still in its infancy, so we proposed a roadmap that outlines the steps required to progress the necessary technologies and fill current knowledge gaps,” says Corradi.
“This includes understanding how cells adapt to altered gravity and radiation,” adds ESA cultivated meat researcher João Garcia. “By using facilities available at ESA, we will soon start experiments to understand these effects.”
Courtesy: European Space Agency
Cultured meat in space
ESA is far from the only space agency investing in alt-proteins like cultivated meat. In 2019, Israeli cultured meat leader Aleph Farms grew beef from bovine cells on the International Space Station, nearly 400km away from any natural resources. “We are proving that cultivated meat can be produced anytime, anywhere, in any condition,” said Aleph Farms co-founder and CEO Didier Toubia. “We can potentially provide a powerful solution to produce the food closer to the population needing it, at the exact and right time it is needed.”
This was followed by another experiment by Aleph Farms last year when it collaborated with SpaceX, whose crew members conducted experiments on microgravity’s effects on muscle tissue growth. They carried beef cells harvested on Earth by Aleph Farms.
NASA has already shown interest in the alt-protein space (pun unintended), with its Deep Space Food Challenge, whose finalists included startups making food using carbon dioxide, algae and fungal proteins, such as Finland’s Solar Foods, which uses gas fermentation to make single-cell proteins. Canada’s space agency is a collaborator on this project too.
NASA has actually been conducting cultured meat experiments since 2001, the same year Willem van Eelen, Wiete Westerhof and Willem van Kooten filed for a patent on cultivated meat production. It has partnered with fungal protein startup Nature’s Fynd as well, focusing on research to develop a micro-gravity biofilm-biomass reactor, which would bring a nutrient-dense vegan protein to astronauts.
Meanwhile, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has been working with Tokyo-based Integriculture Inc. and the Tokyo Women’s Medical University on a project involving cellular agriculture and cultivated meat production in space. JAXA is part of Space FoodSphere too, a programme that includes cultured meat and microbial proteins.
And last year, Mexican cultured meat producer Micro Meat teamed up with US-based space parks developer Orbital Assembly to install meat production equipment in the latter’s space stations. Micro Meat said that working with cultivated meat in zero gravity will help it scale its protein systems on Earth.
Courtesy: Aleph Farms
Calling on the EU to step up
The ESA is now imploring the European Food Safety Authority – the EU’s regulator – to follow the lead of its counterparts in Singapore and the US and grant approvals to companies to sell cultivated meat. In the bloc’s framework, cultivated meat is classed as a ‘novel food’ and requires premarket authorisation.
Its stringent safety regulations have meant that there have been no known applications by cultured meat producers in the region. Aleph Farms did, however, file for clearance earlier this year in Switzerland and the UK (which retains the EU’s novel foods regulations post-Brexit).
“The feeling is that we are at the beginning of a process that could transform the industry, making the conventional meat production model obsolete,” says Corradi. “Developed countries have the historical opportunity to move away from farming and killing animals, being a very inefficient process to produce food, unsustainable for the planet, dangerous for our health and raising more and more ethical concerns among the population.”
Singapore is working on a Food Safety and Security Bill that would offer greater clarity on regulatory frameworks for novel foods like cultivated meat and help prevent foodborne illnesses like the ones suffered from raw seafood, which offers multiple opportunities for cultured meat producers.
At Rethink’s Asia-Pacific Agri-Food Innovation Summit which starts today in Singapore, the nation state’s trade and industry minister Alvin Tam gave a keynote speech to smart protein startups that summed up the city state’s food tech pedigree: “Come to the best place in the world for food innovation.”
Singapore is host to a number of alt-protein startups, and it’s no surprise, given that it was the first (and, for three years, the only) country to approve the sale of cultivated meat when it granted regulatory clearance to Eat Just’s GOOD Meat and its cell-cultured chicken in 2020. The move cemented the island nation’s reputation as a hotbed of food tech innovation with a highly supportive government.
And a year later, there was another world first with Singapore’s granting of a food processing license to Esco Aster, a contract development and manufacturing organisation, for the production of cultured meat.
“Singapore has long been a leader in innovation of all kinds, from information technology to biologics to now leading the world in building a healthier, safer food system,” Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick said at the time. “I’m sure that our regulatory approval for cultured meat will be the first of many in Singapore and in countries around the globe.”
Greater clarity on cultured meat regulation
Courtesy: Eat Just
Providing further clarity on regulatory frameworks for other companies is part of Singapore’s proposed Food Safety and Security Bill. It will combine food-related provisions from across eight existing Acts – like the Wholesome Meat and Fish Act and the Sale of Food Act – into a single Act.
According to the Straits Times, the bill was first mentioned in 2021, with the then sustainability and environment minister Desmond Tan saying it would be tabled later that year. Now, while there is progress on its status, Tan’s successor Grace Fu added that she doesn’t know when the bill would be tabled.
Speaking at the relocation of the Singapore Food Agency’s National Centre for Food Science (which introduced the regulatory framework for risk assessments of novel food), Fu said: “Innovations in food science are introducing novel foods, offering new opportunities to feed the world. Ensuring that such novel food is safe is critical to protect public health.”
She added: “The Bill will provide greater legal clarity on the regulatory framework for new food innovations, such as novel food and gene-edited crops. We will also – in consultation with the industry – look into enhancing the requirements on food safety systems and processes.”
Fu explained that the SFA is already in talks with industry stakeholders to discuss “how we can all work together to collectively ensure a resilient supply of safe food for Singapore”. “I look forward to hearing from and co-creating with our industry and community partners, to shape our new food legislation,” she said.
Food safety and the cultivated opportunity
Courtesy: Shiok Meats
The new bill will look to boost the country’s food security too. One way it plans to do so is by bringing over existing powers for the Rice Stockpiles Scheme, which says rice importers must keep a stockpile of the grain in government-designated warehouses to ensure an adequate supply. It goes hand-in-hand with Singapore’s 30 by 30 initiative, which aims to improve food security by producing 30% of all food consumed in the nation by 2030, thus limiting its reliance on imports.
The new National Centre for Food Science premises combines the SFA’s two food safety and science labs, as well as “streamlines operations, improves accessibility for inspectors to submit samples for testing and provides greater accessibility for external collaborations and industry partnerships”, the regulator said.
One of the key goals of the centre – which will serve as a WHO Collaborating Centre for Food Contamination Monitoring – is to prevent and contain the spread of foodborne illnesses. Fu cited a recent food poisoning outbreak, where NCFS used whole genome sequencing to reveal how the same bacteria detected in the sick was also found in raw seafood.
Moreover, the centre’s radioactivity department has been doubling down on its testing of seafood imported from Japan to look for traces of radioactive contamination, as Japan has begun releasing wastewater from the now-shut Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
These foodborne illnesses combined with Singapore’s regulatory framework can be a great opportunity for cultivated meat and seafood companies to capitalise. Some of the leaders in this space include Shiok Meats, Umami Bioworks and Meatiply. Meanwhile, Dutch cultured pork producer Meatable is eyeing regulatory clearance and a 2024 launch in Singapore.
Launching this week, a new platform of industry stakeholders across nine Asia-Pacific countries is looking to facilitate collaboration to advance the regulatory approval of cultivated meat in the region.
Established by the APAC Society for Cellular Agriculture and the Good Food Institute APAC, the APAC Regulatory Coordination Forum is described as a platform for cross-border dialogue between cell-cultured food producers, industry associations and think tanks, and government agencies and regulators in multiple jurisdictions.
Launching at Singapore International Agri-Food Week (October 31 to November 2), the forum aims to help develop nations’ regulatory frameworks via increased data and knowledge sharing between countries, streamlined review processes for companies hoping to enter multiple markets at once, and reduced trade barriers.
A group of 11 stakeholders from nine countries – including APAC-SCA and GFI APAC – have signed a memorandum of understanding to mark the platform’s formation. These include GFI’s India and Israel chapters, Cellular Agriculture Australia, Japan Association for Cellular Agriculture, Cell AgriTech (Malaysia), University of Brawijaya (Indonesia), Future Ready Food Safety Hub (Singapore), Society for Food Sustainatech (South Korea), and law firm Dentons’ China branch.
Courtesy: The Good Food Institute
More companies and organisations may be added as signatories in the future (on an invitation-only basis), pending approval from GFI APAC and APAC-SCA. At least 37 companies are known to be working with cultivated meat and seafood in Asia, according to GFI. Mirte Gosker, managing director at GFI APAC, says global distribution must expand beyond early adopters for cultured meat to reach its full potential. Currently, only two countries allow the sale of cultivated meat in the world. Singapore was the first to do so in 2020, followed by the US earlier this year.
“By bringing together industry leaders and regulatory officials from countries across Asia Pacific, we are working to reduce duplication of efforts, streamline international approval processes for novel food producers, and create a clear pathway to market for innovative new products,” said Gosker.
Collaboration on regulatory criteria and ‘fast lanes’
“Member entities will be invited to participate in regularly scheduled discussion sessions about the latest developments in regulatory processes, as well as unresolved questions in need of further consideration. They will also have access to private discussion platforms where best practices, advice, and confidential insights can be shared among regional stakeholders,” Gosker adds.
“Through this increased knowledge-sharing and cross-border coordination, we aim to develop clear and effective pathways to commercialisation of cultivated foods, reduce time to market for producers, and create a level playing field when it comes to imports and exports.”
Courtesy: Eat Just
APAC Regulatory Coordination Forum lays out six key goals in its MoU. The first involves facilitating the coordination of regulatory efforts across APAC to build an effective regulatory environment for cultivated proteins, as well as minimise hurdles and bottlenecks.
The platform is also seeking to set up a mechanism for continuous, systematic cross-country dialogue between stakeholders. “Our aim is to transparently share information, collaborate on inputs such as data or safety assessments, and provide open discussions and viewpoints between partners across the region,” the MoU states.
Another goal is mutual recognition of coordinated regulatory frameworks in the region, such as aligning on criteria for safety testing, labelling and inspections. This would help reduce the time and resources needed for approval, and minimise trade barriers and costs for consumers. “These efforts could potentially culminate in the development of trust between authorities to create ‘fast lanes’ for approval of companies already authorised for sale in another regional country.”
Ensuring religious standards and defining novel approaches
The APAC Regulatory Coordination Forum wants to ensure cultured meat and seafood adhere to religious rulings and standards (like halal and kosher), where it noted that coordinated efforts are required to build consensus around the topic. Last month, three Shariah scholars told alt-protein leader Eat Just – the parent company of GOOD Meat, the producer that earned regulatory approval in Singapore – that cultured meat can be considered halal if it meets certain criteria.
The group also aims to standardise regulatory approaches on new approaches yet to be looked into, such as novel cell cultivation technologies and the definition of hybrid and blended meat. Finally, it plans to coordinate information to all participants transparently, bringing each member up to date with current developments and trends in the sector.
“The regulatory forum is established to bring forth a platform to facilitate open and transparent discussions regarding regulatory matters in cellular agriculture,” said Peter Yu, programme director at APAC-SCA. “We hope to build a repository of information that can aid in regulatory coordination across the APAC region while providing a pathway for new jurisdictions to quickly get up to speed.”
Courtesy: Aleph Farms
In addition to GOOD Meat, Australia’s Vow Food is another cultivated meat company that has filed for regulatory approval in APAC, applying to the bilateral Food Standards Australia New Zealand for its cell-cultured quail. But it’s unknown if other companies have filed for approval anywhere, as Gosker explains: “Several companies have publicly discussed their submissions for regulatory approval in Singapore (for example, Meatable), but unlike in Australia/New Zealand, this information is not required to be publicly disclosed by the government.”
She adds: “Japan and South Korea will likely be next in line among APAC countries to develop such frameworks, as both nations are proactively seeking input from industry groups to craft clear and efficient safety review processes. No timeline has been set for when this work will be completed.” Meanwhile, Israel’s Aleph Farms is waiting to hear back from regulators in Switzerland and the UK for its application.
“The biggest barrier to cultivated meat approvals in emerging markets is the need for regulators to adapt existing regulatory frameworks or develop new standards,” Gosker says. “This will vary country-by-country, based on their existing regulatory regimes, but by sharing best practices and proactively facilitating conversations between industry leaders and regulators, the APAC Regulatory Coordination Forum aims to streamline and accelerate this process in a way that is beneficial for governments and innovators alike.”
“Ultimately, we envision a clear and effective contingency for the industry as a whole towards commercialisation of cultivated food products across the region,” said Yu. “We encourage the participation of any potential new members vested in these matters, located among any of our APAC member countries.”
A new report by the APAC Society for Cellular Agriculture (APAC-SCA) has revealed that an overwhelming majority of South Koreans are willing to try cultivated meat at least once, while price and taste remain key barriers. Regulatory breakthroughs, better labelling and industry collaboration are key to advancing this industry.
The Good Food Institute recently called South Korea a “global hotbed of alternative protein innovation”. In February, 28 industry stakeholders signed an MoU to advance the country’s cultured meat industry, while a month later, the North Gyeongsang province opened a 2,309 sq m Cellular Agriculture Industry Support Center.
There are at least nine companies working with cultivated meat in South Korea. These include the likes of CellMEAT, which has created prototypes of cultured Dokdo shrimp and caviar, TissenBioFarm, Simple Planet, CellQua, Space F, and SeaWith. Meanwhile, Korean noodle giant Nongshim invested $7.4M in food tech venture funding, with a focus on cultivated meat, and CJ CheilJedang has partnered with KCell Biosciences to build a cell culture facility in Busan.
Now, a new 1,110-person survey by APAC-SCA – a 2022-founded coalition working to advance the cultivated meat and seafood industry in the region – has found that consumer attitudes in the country back up the growing number of companies and developments in this sector.
Consumer attitudes towards cultivated meat in South Korea
Courtesy: Cellmeat
APAC-SCA’s poll revealed that 90% of respondents say they’re willing to try cultivated meat at least once (though only 5% say they’d definitely eat it regularly). On top of that, 39% of Koreans are supportive of cell-based meat being sold at supermarkets and restaurants (with 14- to 29-year-olds leading the way) – only 10% are opposed to its commercialisation.
Meanwhile, 55% of consumers consider cultured meat to be similar to plant-based alternatives, while 19% would actually prefer cultivated proteins over vegan versions. This is especially true for people aged 20-29. And when it comes to motivators, price tops the list with 65% of South Koreans citing it as a factor, which is closely followed by taste and texture (62%). Health/nutrition (48%) and environmental reasons (47%) are important as well – but animal welfare is a factor for only a third of the respondents.
Interestingly, while 84% of consumers would favour a plant-based growth culture for cell-based meat, 35% wouldn’t mind seeing fetal bovine serum (FBS) being used to make these products. In fact, for a fifth (21%) of Koreans, FBS would be the most preferred option. This could indicate a lack of understanding about the different mediums on the part of consumers, prompting them to choose FBS over other cultivation mediums in their primary selection,” says Carisa Lim, project manager at APAC-SCA.
“However, we see that FBS ranks lower in the preferred cultivation medium overall, suggesting that negative perception of FBS still remains among the surveyed South Korean population,” she added. Meanwhile, 62% and 57% would be happy to see a serum based on marine microalgae or yeast, respectively.
Price is key
CellMEAT’s caviar prototype | Courtesy
Only 1% of people in the survey say they don’t eat meat or seafood in some form, with two-thirds consuming it between three to five times per week, and 13% doing so daily. Meat remains the largest source of protein for the country, followed by eggs and dairy – and consumption of the former is also set to steadily rise over the next decade. On average, 36% of Koreans spend less than ₩30,000 ($22) weekly on meat products for their entire household, while 31% spend between ₩30,000-50,000 ($22-37).
But people aren’t willing to pay too much more when it comes to cultivated meat. In fact, only 12% say they’d be happy to pay ₩1,000-3,000 (74c-$2.2) more per 100g of cultured meat, and an even fewer 6% would be willing to pay more than that.
However, 57% claim they’d eat cell-cultured pork if it’s cheaper than its conventional counterpart (if taking ₩10,000/$7.4 per 100g as its average price), and 25% said the same for beef that costs ₩15,000/$11.1 per 100g. This suggests price parity – and thus scalability – is amongst the biggest obstacles for the cultivated meat industry in South Korea.
“Hybrid products and scaling up production are key factors to achieve price parity – and it is at the forefront on many of the companies’ agenda either today or in the near future,” explains Lim. “We need combined synergies and efforts through investors, contract manufacturers, established stakeholders, startups, and government bodies to facilitate a thriving ecosystem for cultivated meat and seafood in South Korea.”
Report recommendations
Courtesy: TissenBioFarm
Last year, South Korea’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety included official guidance for alt-protein in its national plan last year, which included a focus on the safety, manufacturing processes and regulatory approval of cultivated meat. It has also amended the Food Sanitation Act to recognize cultivated food as an ingredient within the legal framework, pledged its support towards bringing these products to market, and prioritised the establishment of regulatory frameworks for these foods.
Such legislative support is key, as one of APAC-SCA’s report recommendations points out. Clear guidance and a robust regulatory framework will provide much-needed clarity on the safety of these products to consumers, while coordination of regulatory efforts would help make better-informed decisions and support evidence-based policies for the growth and acceptance of cultured meat and seafood. Additionally, tasting guidelines on regulator-approved cultivated meat can help manufacturers test the safety of their products.
APAC-SCA points out the importance of industry collaboration too, as knowledge-sharing can help support the development of a consistent approach towards cultivated meat production. It adds that setting an industry standard can help reduce risks, establish consistency, and provide a reliable framework of reference for these products across the supply chain.
“Well-conceived industry standards are important to ensure a level playing field for players along the cultivated meat and seafood supply chain, and can serve as a frame of reference for regulatory bodies,” notes Lim, adding that APAC-SCA is developing the first industry standard for labelling, safety and manufacturing of cultured meat in Singapore. “This will provide a framework of best practices for new and existing players, thereby supporting the growth and acceptance of cultivated foods as a sustainable and safe food source.”
Finally, unified messaging for consumer awareness and education is paramount to gain their confidence, as are simple and clear product labels to identify cultured meat in South Korea. “At the moment, there is no label to differentiate cultivated food products from its conventional animal counterparts. As more cultivated meat and seafood companies look to commercialise their products, a simple and clear label can help consumers make informed purchasing decisions, and boost their confidence in consuming these products.”
“With the rapid advancements in cultivated food technology over the past decade, many companies have – or will soon possess – the capacity to go to market,” added Peter Yu, APAC-SCA programme director. “Hence, the ability to demonstrate it can be done safely and efficiently is now a primary consideration for the industry.
“Considering [that] close to eight in 10 consumers indicate that they consume meat or seafood three or more times a week, there is a great opportunity and incentive for the close collaboration between the government and industry to overcome key regulatory challenges, which will in turn drive growth and commercialisation efforts.”
The below conversation is the transcript of the first episode of the podcast miniseries Green Queen in Conversation: Cultivated Meat Pioneers featuring Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Eat Just and GOOD Meat, interviewed by show host Sonalie Figueiras. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
In the first episode of the Green Queen in Conversation podcast miniseries, Cultivated Meat Pioneers, I talk to Josh Tetrick, founder and CEO of Eat Just and GOOD Meat. I don’t know if you can have a conversation about cultivated meat without talking to Josh. This is someone who set himself a goal to be the first cultivated meat company in the world to gain commercial approval and who achieved it in a very short amount of time. I think that really changed the narrative and changed the game for the entire industry; it really brought cultivated meat to mainstream attention.
I’ve known Josh for a long time now. And he’s a force to be reckoned with, he’s extremely clear on his vision, and he’s unwavering in his execution. So, I’m really excited to share our conversation. We cover a lot of ground, including how it felt to make history, why he went for cultivated meat when he was already doing really well with plant-based eggs, and whether the industry has progressed enough. I’m sure you’re all going to love it. It’s hard not to be wowed by his dedication to the mission of creating a food system that is sustainable, nutritious, ethical, and slaughter-free.
Sonalie Figueiras: Hey, Josh, how are you? Thanks for joining me today.
Josh Tetrick: Hey, good to be with you.
Sonalie Figueiras: It’s been a really long time since we first met. I was thinking about it, I think it’s at least five or six years now.
Josh Tetrick: We met before the world commercialized cultivated meat before cultivated meat was ever sold.
Sonalie Figueiras: Absolutely, we met back in Hong Kong, and we were really meeting about Eat Just and all your work and plant-based eggs. So, I wanted to dive in on that front. Why did you decide to go into cultivated meat when you had Eat Just already, and you already had great traction? It’s a great product, I have it in my freezer at all times, and it seems like a big enough problem to solve. Why go for the cultivated meat challenge?
Josh Tetrick: “Why eggs?” – that’s a big enough problem to solve – about 2 trillion eggs were laid last year, and most of them were laid in a way that is not very good for our health, nor for the planet’s health, nor for the bird who’s laying the eggs’ health; but we thought we could do something else too. So, we wanted to have a “what’s next” after the egg and decided that making real meat without slaughter was a good “what’s next”, and we’d learned a lot about how to think about commercializing a food technology product. We’ve learned a lot about how consumers think about eating these different approaches to making everyday foods, and we thought those lessons about scaling up and consumer insights could put us in a place where we could make cultivated meat happen.
Sonalie Figueiras: Sure. Now, I want to dig a little deeper – when was the first time you came across cultivated meat technology?When did that moment happen where you went, “I think we can pursue this?”
Josh Tetrick: Well, probably the first time I came across it was 20 years ago. I think I was reading a paper about how NASA was exploring the technology for long-term space travel, and it was about six years ago that we decided to pursue it as the next product in the company; but it really just came from this understanding that people seem to like meat, they liked the taste of it, they liked the texture of it, they liked the smell of it, they liked the feeling of it. Is there a way to make that [meat] the same texture, the same taste, the same composition, but in a way that’s a lot better? Then we spent about eight months to a year talking to folks around the world about whether the technology was viable, about what needed to be done if we decided to pursue it, and then we decided to go after it and make it the thing that we focus on.
Courtesy: Eat Just
Sonalie Figueiras: How different is it to scale a plant-based egg versus pioneering a piece of cultivated chicken meat?
Josh Tetrick: The things that are similar are that you need food scientists, food engineers, product developers, and regulatory professionals, and people who are really smart with consumer insights, branding, awareness, and communications. That’s similar. The idea of making it is completely different. With a plant-based egg, you’re starting with a mung bean, then you’re separating protein from the mung bean, and you’re making the egg. With this, you’re starting with a cell. You’re identifying feed for the cell, think amino acids, vitamins and minerals, and salts and sugars, and then you’re scaling it up in a stainless-steel vessel. So, the kinds of talent that you need are pretty similar, but the whole process of making it is pretty different.
Sonalie Figueiras: So, the way you’ve explained it right there sounds really intuitive and makes sense, but when you first approached your board of investors, did they get it? Were they like, “Okay, yes, you were doing plant-based eggs, and now you’re going to do cultivated chicken, and these are different ways to solve essentially, the same broken food system problems?”
Josh Tetrick: I think some people did, some people didn’t. I think you can look at one hand and say, “If you want to do chicken or beef, why not just do plant-based chicken or beef? Why do cultivated meat? Our response is that we’re not a plant-based company. We’re a company that’s attempting to develop technology to displace conventional animal agriculture, and if that means that we’re going to separate protein from a mung bean, we’ll do it. If that means we’re going to cultivate meat, we’ll do it. If that means we’re about precision fermentation, we’ll do it. So, we’re not locked on a specific technology path, we’re more so locked on a specific effective path, and sometimes, I think plant-based can be a better approach, and sometimes I think cultivating can be a better approach. So that’s what we tell people.
Sonalie Figueiras: So again, that makes total sense intuitively; but what about consumers? Marketing is usually about distilling one idea, one product, one concept. Do you feel like there’s confusion, and especially as you get up to the point where you may eventually have your chicken in a store, or in more countries? Is it confusing to a consumer?
Josh Tetrick: Well, today, we don’t need to worry about it, because we just sell our cultivated meat, under our brand GOOD Meat in Singapore in a single butcher shop today. So, the only people that are buying it are people who live in Singapore, who are going to Huber’s Butchery. We’re still the only company in the world that has ever received regulatory approval to actually go on and sell it. Now, when we expand much wider – let’s say when GOOD Meat is in 40,000 points of distribution, when it is in thousands of Walmarts, Whole Foods, Shoprites, Publix’s, and restaurants all across the country, then I think you have a higher probability of confusion, but that’s why we decided to develop the GOOD Meat brand, and not call it “Just Meat”. So, it’s called GOOD Meat – it’s about cultivating meat, just like Just Egg is specific to what we’re doing on the eggs side. So, that’s just one way of differentiating the plant-based side from the meat-based side. However, it’ll be a good bit of time, I mean, you’re talking years out, until we actually have the manufacturing be able to get it across that many points of distribution. So, we’ve got some time to sort out how people think about it and whether they’re confused or not.
Cultivated meat comes to its first butcher shop in Singapore | Courtesy Eat Just
Sonalie Figueiras: It sounds like you have given this a lot of thought when you’re describing all the points of distribution. Do you have specific goalposts that you want to hit?
Josh Tetrick: It starts with what we want in the long-term, and what we want in the long-term is for cultivated meat to be the majority of meat that is produced on the planet. That’s the long-term [plan], and that’s not going to happen in 10 years. That’s a much longer lifetime, potentially a project over many lifetimes. Closer in, we want to continue selling products in Singapore at Huber’s Butchery, and we want to expand to more restaurants. As the year continues, and we already received FDA approval in the US, now it’s about USDA approval. Once we get that we want to launch with Jose Andres at one of his restaurants in DC [Editor’s Note: this already happened in July 2023, a few weeks after this episode was recorded]. And then as we build more infrastructure, meaning larger and larger vessels before the end of the decade, we want to make tens of millions of pounds of cultivated me at a cost that’s below conventional meat.
Sonalie Figueiras: So, tell me, for people who are not in the food industry. What percentage is tens of millions of pounds of cultivated meat compared to how much chicken is being consumed in the United States, for example?
Josh Tetrick: Much, much less than 1%? I would look at the trajectory of cultivated meat as being somewhat similar to electric cars. So, you can look at electric car production today, and depending on how you look at it, you can draw different conclusions. So, on the one hand, only 1% of the cars on the street right now are electric. That’s it, only 1%. With all the funding around electric cars, all the consumers and all your friends who might be driving around, globally, today, only 1% are electric cars.
However, double-click on that, and then you say – well, what about in certain areas like Norway and Sweden? So, over 60% of the cars on the road over there are electric. Then what about new cars that are manufactured? I think that’s roughly about 20% of new cars that are manufactured electric. Then, you look at announcements of big companies like Ford, GM, etc., and they say they’re moving entirely away from conventional gasoline-produced cars by 2032-2035. So, the seeds of change are being planted, and I think you’ll see the same thing with cultivated meat. So, even though by the end of the decade, we’re talking tens of millions of pounds, and even though that is a lot less than 1%, that’s how stuff starts, right? That’s how you build a foundation to ultimately cultivated meat being the only kind of meat that’s produced.
Sonalie Figueiras: Does it ever feel too daunting? When you think in terms of multiple lifetimes, for example? Do you ever think it’s just so hard, and will we ever get there?
Josh Tetrick: Well, it is very daunting. It is very hard. It is very challenging. It is very uncertain, and it is very long-term. If you don’t accept those things, you should not be in the cultivated meat business, that is for sure. Those things are very true.
However, what I think is also true is that the alternative is less palatable: The alternative where meat production continues to grow, and more and more people are eating meat. Now, I’m plant-based myself, except for the fact that I eat cultivated meat (I had a piece of cultivated chicken this afternoon), but we live in a world where I think the majority of people are eating meat. As much as I wish that they would choose beans instead of meat, which is so much healthier, and I wish that everyone would right now, and we wouldn’t even be needed, that’s a hard world to imagine.
However, yes, this is a very long-term, very uncertain project. Sometimes, when folks are asking a hard question where they’re criticizing it, they might say this is very challenging, very long-term, and very uncertain. So, what do you say to them? I say, “That’s right, I agree,” and they say “Therefore, what? We and others shouldn’t do it?” Then our response is, “Let’s give it a try. Let’s see what we’ve got. Let’s see what we can do.”
Sonalie Figueiras: Absolutely! You’re human, and it just sometimes might feel like this is really hard, but it sounds like you accept it as a part of the rules of the game, which I think is probably the way to see it.
Josh Tetrick: I wish you could build the infrastructure faster. I wish that instead of tens of millions of pounds before the end of the decade, it was billions of pounds before the end of the decade. I wish instead of costing billions to build the infrastructure, it was millions to build the infrastructure. I do wish all those things, but you know, that’s not the reality of it. So, we’ve got to deal with it and realize that just because something takes many decades, all those things have to start somewhere. And the sooner we get started, the sooner they’ll get done.
Chef José Andrés cooks GOOD Meat’s chicken | Courtesy: GOOD Meat
Sonalie Figueiras: What can make it go faster? Is it is it more money? Is it the government putting money behind this? If you had more billions, could you build the infrastructure faster?
Josh Tetrick: Yeah, a lot of things can make go faster. So, certainly, more capital invested in the industry, so if you had instead of hundreds of millions, you had hundreds of billions, you would go faster. You could build infrastructure faster, you could design and engineer the vessels. You could hire more people, you could accelerate research and development, for sure more capital would make it go faster, and that additional capital could come from private investors or certainly come from the government. So, I think governments getting behind it could also make it go faster: The US government, China, governments in the Middle East, those governments deciding that cultivated meat is more than just about mitigating climate change, it’s about food security, that could help it go faster. So yeah, certainly it doesn’t have to be, you know, many lifetimes.
Sonalie Figueiras: Okay, so more money and more attention and more governmental support would accelerate this, 100%.
Josh Tetrick: No question.
Sonalie Figueiras: This is not just a technology-specific problem to solve, it’s more of a resources problem as well.
Josh Tetrick: Yeah, I think the technology is here for simpler products. So, for our chicken that people eat at Huber’s Butchery: it’s good-tasting chicken, and people like it. Could it be better? Sure. Could it be on a bone? Sure. Could we have, you know, delicious Kobe steak instead of the chicken? Might that be better? Sure, but the chicken is good. So, we know how to manufacture meat and convert it into a finished product that people will like. So, for the simpler products, it’s here now, but for more complicated stuff – bluefin tuna, and more complicated textures, the technology is not here yet, but you know, roughly half the meat that is sold is simple stuff: ground beef, sausages, chicken nuggets, and chicken strips, you know, we can do all that now.
Sonalie Figueiras: You’ve mentioned Huber’s Butchery a few times and we’re talking about, you know, many lifetimes of progress to go, but you did do this one incredible thing: you made history in December 2020, just a couple of years after you announced that you were working on GOOD Meat, you got the world’s first cultivated meat regulatory approval! People in Singapore could go and buy chicken at that point, it was in restaurants, and even at hawker stalls. Now, it’s at the butchery. How did that happen? When did you decide that you were going to go for that, and did you consciously decide you wanted to be the first to get that regulatory approval and get that commercialization?
Josh Tetrick: Yeah, definitely, we definitely consciously wanted to be the first, and we thought about places that would be the most likely to approve it, and Singapore was at the top of the list, just knowing that Singapore is a very forward-thinking country who cares a lot about food security; they have an initiative called “30-by-30”, where they aim to get 30% of their food produced in the country by the end of the decade. So, knowing all these things, we felt that Singapore was a good first place to apply to. So, we applied sometime in 2018, and then we waited and answered questions from their regulatory body about, “where the cell came from?”; What do you feed the cell? How do you manufacture it? How do you ensure the safety? What is the microbiological profile? How is it different than conventional chicken? “How do you know it’s safe?”, and 90 other questions like that, and then we got the approval in November 2020. We went on to actually serve it at a restaurant in a restaurant called 1880, and that was the first time that cultivated meat had ever been sold in the world. We definitely wanted to be the first. We thought it would send out a message to the food industry, and to consumers around the world that this idea of making meat without slaughter is not science fiction, but it is on plates right now, even at that very small scale.
Sonalie Figueiras: So, you went in there, chose Singapore, and thought, that’s the country?
Josh Tetrick: We did. Yeah, we didn’t think the US was the place.
Sonalie Figueiras: Right, that was my follow-up. I mean, you’re American, you know, you’re from the US. So why not the US as the first country?
Josh Tetrick: It just didn’t seem like the USDA or the FDA at the time were really looking at this. In that way, it felt like Singapore was in a place where they were more than ready to address it. We ended up also applying to the FDA, but it just felt like Singapore was ahead of the curve, and we wanted to get to the market sooner.
Sonalie Figueiras: What do you think makes the difference between governments that are ahead of the curve, and others that are not so much? For example, seeing what’s going on in Italy where they’re thinking about passing a ban, or with the EU, where they are a little bit more conservative, even though the first cultivated meatball was actually created in the Netherlands, in Europe. How do you look at governments’ attitudes, and why are some governments just pro-cultivated meat and want to support the industry, and others are thinking of passing bans?
Josh Tetrick: Yeah. Well, I still think that we’re very, very early in the industry. So, it definitely is to be determined how a lot of these governments decide to look at it. I think that typically, when you have governments that are pro-innovative, and there’s a food security issue, they’re going to want to be the first to jump, and Singapore was the first to jump at this, right? They’re very pro-innovative, developing new technologies in the country, and they’ve got a food security issue. So, that’s the combination that’s going to get you cultivated meat regulated sooner.
The US has now been ahead of the curve on it too, the FDA has approved two companies, including ours, and the USDA is actively engaged in this [Editor’s Note: GOOD Meat received USDA regulatory approval a few weeks after this conversation took place]. So, I think sometimes people look at the US and think it’s behind the curve, but at least our experience with regulators, they’ve been ahead of the curve on this. I think it’s a mindset of people who are in government about how they think about innovation, how they think about tradition versus developing new things, and how open they are to new technologies.
Sometimes, you know, being conservative about new things is a good thing. There are a lot of food products that are not sold in Europe today that I think are rightfully not sold in Europe today, and that’s a good thing. However, I think you have to have a balance of really understanding when to lean into innovation and when to be a bit more cautious, but I think when we look at the regulatory landscape, even if we were approved by every country in the world today, we’re going to be producing exactly the same amount of cultivated meat this year. It’s not as if twenty more approvals mean millions of more pounds, we got approval in America, or at least the FDA and waiting on the USDA, and Singapore, and we have got our hands full with just those two markets, but I definitely want more countries to open up to it, and I think they will.
Sonalie Figueiras: What do you think people are getting wrong about the science of cultivated meat? Let’s talk about consumer perception because the media has been a little messy around this, and as you say, it’s human to question you and to be cautious. However, there’s also been, I would say, an unhealthy degree of misinformation to some extent. If you were talking to a sceptic, what are people getting wrong?
Josh Tetrick: Yeah, really good question. I think there are a number of things that people are getting wrong. So, in no particular order: Sometimes people think cultivated meat is plant-based meat, and I’m a big fan of plant-based meat, but cultivated meat is different from plant-based meat, and plant-based meat is different from conventional meat. Those are three different approaches to making to making meat. So, that’s one [thing people get wrong]. Sometimes I’ll do a whole presentation in front of a group of people, and they’ll ask what plants are we using to make this. So, it’s important to understand that cultivated meat is from a cell, not a bean. If you have a chicken allergy and you have our chicken at Huber’s, you’re going to have an allergic outbreak, it’s still real meat.
The second thing that people get wrong about it is that they’ll say it is this moniker of lab-grown. Now, when we make meat today, both in Singapore and when will produce it for the US market, we do lab research, but we don’t make our products in the lab. Just like Danone does research for yogurt in the lab, they don’t make yogurt in a lab. So, I think in the really early days of cultivated meat, and we’re still in the early days, this whole idea of, you know, taking it out of a petri dish and serving it on a plate was right. That’s not how it is today. Now, these manufacturing facilities I’m talking about are very small, but nonetheless, they are manufacturing facilities – the ones in the US that will be regulated by the USDA, those are not a lab, right? So, that’s the second thing I think people get wrong.
The third thing is, one might say it’s too hard to scale as well, and when I hear that criticism my answer is it’s really hard to scale it up, but “really hard” is different than “impossible” to scale up. So, it requires a ton of investment, time, energy and technical knowledge to scale it up, but it is still very much within the realm of what is possible to do, it is just a big technical and epic capital challenge.
The fourth thing that people get wrong is they think fetal bovine serum or FBS is necessary to do it. It’s not. It was in the early days, and now we actually received approval in Singapore to commercialize our meat without it. We’ve removed it in our R&D facility over the last couple of years. It was a technical challenge, it’s not anymore. So, people should stop thinking that it’s this big barrier because it’s not.
Then maybe, finally, skeptics would say, well, consumers don’t want it. Unfortunately, the only consumer real-life consumer examples we have are in Singapore. I wish we had more, but that’s all we’ve got, and what we have found in Singapore is people say they would eat this instead of regular meat: When they buy it, they consume it, and they hang out with their friends as they’re eating it. They say, “You know what, I would choose this instead.”
So, those are some basic criticisms and how we would address them. Some of the things about cultivating meat, to an everyday person, would sound kind of strange. I think it’s not. We shouldn’t expect that someone hears about the process of making cultivated meat and immediately say, “Oh, that sounds amazing! I want to eat that!”
It’s not every day that you can make meat from a cell instead of slaughtering a live animal. So, I think you also have to be a bit patient with people and know that this is a brand-new thing, and you’ve got to explain it. You’ve got to be really open about it, and not everyone is going to like it right away because not everyone likes anything right away, but you’ve still got to go after it.
Courtesy: Eat Just
Sonalie Figueiras: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s so interesting, because you did launch in Singapore, and the early data shows that Asian consumers tend to be more open to cultivated meat. There was also this really interesting study that was done in Singapore earlier this year about how people who have higher well-being tend to be more open to consuming cultivated meats. Do you think about why there seems to be a bigger openness in Asia? Or do you just think we don’t have enough information yet to really understand?
Josh Tetrick: I think we probably don’t have enough information yet. I’ve become really skeptical of data that’s not real-world consumers eating something because you can ask questions in a lot of different ways to try to get at things. Generally, I feel like you’re going to get a much better sense of how a consumer thinks about it when it’s widely available, when they’ve eaten it and when they have really experienced it. That’s why the data from consumers in Singapore who have actually bought GOOD Meat and eaten it is our most valuable data. I trust that data more than I trust, you know, surveying a million people, whether it’s good for us or bad for us, doesn’t matter, I just trust it more, because it is more like a direct experience. However, I think generally the younger you are, the more open you are to it. I think the more educated you are, the more open you are to it. I think the more urban you are, the more open you are to it. I think those things are correlated with an openness to it.
I used to be frustrated because I would have liked everyone to want it, you know, now, but again, no product is like that. No product that’s launched, do you suddenly have everyone on the planet wanting it. You always have to build from a base. You know, Coca-Cola was launched in Atlanta at these high-end social clubs and farms, right?
Sonalie Figueiras: Given everything that we’re talking about how consumers are thinking about it, and, you know, human psychology and consumer behavior, how should the industry be thinking about consumer perception, and is the industry doing enough? I struggle with this because as you’ve said many times, it’s super early, there’s only one country, one company (yours) who’s even making cultivated meat that anyone can taste. Should there be work being done now to open people’s minds, or is it too early? How do you think about that? How do you think the industry at large should be thinking about that?
Josh Tetrick: I struggle with that a little bit. I think I lean towards yes. I just think you have to do it in a way that you don’t delude yourself, because just asking thousands of people to fill out a survey without food in front of them can be a recipe for deluding yourself about, you know: “Here’s a description of what cultivated meat is, and here’s how it smells, and here’s that. So, do you like it? So, it is hard, but I think some data is probably better than not having any.
There are lots of important questions that are asked like – what don’t you like about it? We ask that question a lot, and often what we hear is: “Well, what I don’t like about it is I don’t understand it. What I don’t understand is, what do you mean you make meat from a cell? What do you mean you feed the cell? What the hell is a bioreactor? What does that look like? What’s in the bioreactor? What do you mean you harvest the meat? All these terms, I deal with every day, right, but to an everyday person, they’ve never even thought about that before.
So, I think asking people what it is about it that gives them a concern, what gives them the pause, what do they think it should be called. I think there’s been a lot of valuable work that’s been done in this area, and what we and others have found is that using the word “cell”, using words like “cell-based”, or “cell-cultured”, or certainly “lab-grown”, is not effective with consumers. Using words like “cultivating meat”, or “cultured” is typically number two and ends up being a lot better, and I think that’s valuable data, and we use “cultivated” in Singapore very much because of that data.
I think all this data is also really important, because governments look at it, and investors look at it. When a government is deciding whether they should fund this, they’re going to be looking at some data. So, I think having that data out there, again, even if it’s incomplete, even if it’s imperfect, I still think it’s important, but when the product actually gets out there in the real world, to many more people, that’ll be the most important kind of data.
Sonalie Figueiras: What about marketing? Should you be doing marketing campaigns? Should the industry get together and do a massive campaign about cultivated meat, and you know, what it means and what it is?
Josh Tetrick: I don’t think so yet. I mean, we do marketing in Singapore. So, we do marketing around our Huber’s launch, we do marketing whether it’s bringing influencers around, billboards, and other all sorts of different activations we do, and we’ll do marketing when we launched in the US with Chef Jose Andres. We’ll make a big deal out of it, we’ll have lots of media attention, maybe a billboard or two around it.
I don’t think we need a national kind of marketing campaign quite yet. I think most consumers will look at that, and be like, “It’s just too early.” Now, maybe in three, six, or nine months, once it’s in the market in the US more people are talking about it, then maybe. Maybe, but honestly, I don’t have that good a feel on how early it should start. I think the part of me that thinks it should start earlier is you don’t want opinions to get sort of solidified in people’s heads, and that can happen, you know.
Courtesy: Eat Just
Sonalie Figueiras: That’s my concern as a journalist, and seeing what’s going on in the media and the headlines, I’m wondering: “Should we be covering this narrative, or having a narrative of our own”? But again, as you say, food is real, food is tangible. So, I hear you on that, and I think you’re right.
Josh Tetrick: Yeah, it’s a hard one. I think there’s a case to be made for both because opinions can get calcified, but on the other hand, if I saw a cultivated meat commercial and I was sitting in my home I would think: “This is not even going to be available to me for another two years, like what are we talking about?
Sonalie Figueiras: But I mean, to some extent, it would be interesting to see how early there were EV (electric vehicle) commercials.
Josh Tetrick: True.
Sonalie Figueiras: Although, while I appreciate the EV parallel, food is not cars, unfortunately. There is a difference for people. I hear you on the marketing, but there does seem to be this kind of politicization of food choices that is becoming more pervasive, especially in the US, and it’s spilling over to Europe, and food really is this kind of identity topic for people, you know, it’s your grandmother’s baked cake, or it’s your mom’s lasagna. How do we navigate that, because “new” always seems to be on the other side of the fence when it comes to the ultimate food, that is, you know, pure, and from the land, natural, and home-grown?
Josh Tetrick: Yeah, that’s a hard one, you’re right. Food is different than a car. Food is much more about identity, and stories that we have about ourselves and where we’re from.
One of my food stories is about how my mom used to make me chicken wings when I got off the bus in middle school, and even though I know the horrible conditions of animals, viscerally I understand it, but when I think about the chicken wings, I think about how it’s a feel-good experience, because my mom was caring for me as I got off the bus, right? That’s, I guess, bizarre in a way, because I know what’s behind it, but on the other hand, I can’t take my mom and her love from me in that moment out of my story. So, the identity piece is a really significant one, and I think the ways that you can deal with it are trying to figure out how to serve and talk about cultivated meat in a way that speaks to identity.
One example of how we did that in Singapore is we launched this local hawker stall with a street vendor named Mr. Loo, and Mr. Loo has been making chicken curry rice for 60 years. Mr. Loo is not high-end, he’s an everyday person, but he makes super tasty food, and we wanted to launch with Mr. Loo, because we wanted to make a point about cultivated meat and the identity around it, that it could work with tradition. It could work with something that your father and his father had, and I think looking for opportunities to tap into the tradition piece plus forward-thinking cuisine, like what we are doing with Chef Jose Andres when we launch with him is important. I think about putting it in all sorts of more traditional dishes and having people and influencers representing that side of it, that is going to be important.
Another way you can get politicians behind this is to build stuff in their district. Biotech is a really good example of this. So, biotech is booming in North Carolina. North Carolina is…
Sonalie Figueiras: It’s a triangle.
Josh Tetrick: Exactly! As a Southern state, mostly Republican citizens, mostly Republican senators, and congressmen and congresswomen, but man, they are so into biotech, and it’s not about left or right, it’s about biotechnology creating jobs for the state of North Carolina. So, I think if you can show that this is creating real jobs, and it’s having a real meaningful impact to the economy, I think that’s a way to mitigate some of the sharper edges around about making it political. However, you’re not going to stop someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, from getting involved. She’s gonna do her thing.
Sonalie Figueiras: “She’s gonna do her thing.” [laughter].
Josh Tetrick: No matter what, but she’s got to deal with it.
Sonalie Figueiras: Yeah, but I like that. I like the idea of looking for ways to communicate the traditional identity with the new technology. So, when you did that in Singapore, with the hawker and Mr. Loo, was it overwhelmingly positive? Did your thesis work, in the sense that people feel like, “Oh yeah, this is the kind of the food I love, you know, chicken satays, and it’s just made in a different way. It’s better for the planet and for our health!”
Josh Tetrick: Yeah, it did. I mean, the most important person was Mr. Loo. The guy has been running it for 50-60 years, and he felt that way. He went from resisting it, right, this is a new, weird thing made in a stainless-steel vessel to, “Wait, this works really well in my chicken curry rice dish, this sounds good,” and we’re not better than Mr. Loo, right? We work with what he’s doing, and this is not about making food that is too high-end for Mr. Loo, right? It has to work in that context. It has to work on a grill in a backyard in Birmingham, Alabama before a football game. I think the more that we and other companies can make it work there, the more we will win.
Sonalie Figueiras: That must have felt good, right, when he came around and liked it? I mean, being an entrepreneur is hard. Over the years with the GOOD Meat journey, specifically, what have been some of the days or moments that just felt likea really big win and felt really incredible?
Josh Tetrick: Well, definitely the day we got regulatory approval…that was November 2020.
Sonalie Figueiras: Where were you? What were you doing? Tell me the story.
Josh Tetrick: Yeah. I was in Boulder, Colorado, and I was actually laying on the floor, because I thought we were going to get it that night, and I was just waiting for a phone call from a person named “Kat” on the regulatory team. Then she gave me a call, I woke up, and that was incredible. When we actually launched in late 2020, on December 24th, we put it on the plate, and people ate it, and I saw a receipt. I really wanted to see the receipt, you know, when someone puts their credit card down, you’ve got a receipt, that’s not a sample anymore, that is a sale, and that was what I wanted. So, that was a really big moment. Then probably more recently, when we got FDA approval, that was pretty significant. That’s just about a month and a half ago.
Sonalie Figueiras: Yeah, that was really recent. That’s just now!
Josh Tetrick: Yeah, yeah, and I think the next one will be when we actually launch in the US, with Chef Jose Andres, you know, he’s such a leader in the world of food.
Sonalie Figueiras: Let’s talk more about that. I mean, he’s a food saint. How do you know him, and how did that happen?
Josh Tetrick: I’ve met him through the years at different conferences and things, and when we knew that at some point, we were going to launch in the US, I reached out to him and just began talking to him about what it would look like for him to be the person that we launched with. He’s always open.
Sonalie Figueiras: Was he initially skeptical? What was his take on cultivated meat, given he represents this idea of home-grown, artisanal, organic food?
Josh Tetrick: He wanted to know more about it. So, he wanted me to walk through the process with him. He wanted to know what it means to go from a cell to chicken. He wanted to know about what a bioreactor is. He wanted to talk to a research and development team. So, he didn’t say yes right away, he wanted to learn more. Right away, he wanted to know what the skeptics were saying, right? How are people criticizing it, and what do I agree with in terms of people criticizing it? So, we went through all that with him, and he made the decision that we needed to figure out a different approach to making meat for billions of people. That doesn’t mean, now I’m sharing his point of view, that someone who’s making some high-end lamb in Patagonia is now suddenly displaced. However, as we’re thinking about a growing population, and how the heck you feed so many people, given that we don’t have a bigger planet, I think he realizes that you need a different approach, and he thinks that this is a part of it.
Sonalie Figueiras: That’s awesome. He’s pretty special. I’d feel really awesome about that. He’s definitely someone I think that can really get consumers in. He’s just someone who really understands food and food culture, but he also is someone who has a really big social role with regard to food inequality, food access, and the quality of food that different types of people eat based on their socio-economic background.
I want to dig a little deeper on this because I know that in quite a few of your interviews, you’ve spoken about this idea that capitalism can create positive social change. The world feels very unequal in many ways, particularly with food access, in that there is less hunger, and there is better nutrition across the board, but there’s also rising inequality, and it does feel like there is a sort of elite population around the world that is getting access to better and better food, while mass available food becomes worse and worse, in terms of health and the way it’s produced with industrial agriculture.
Do you still think that capitalism is ultimately the force for good? Where do you see this, given where we are today? Also, in terms of cultivated meat, this idea that for some people, there’s a worry that cultivated meat is just going to slot into this kind of elite food structure and be something for the elites, because of its costs and barriers to entry?
Josh Tetrick: Yeah, well, I don’t think capitalism is in itself a force for good. I think capitalism is a system that can be a force for horrible things, and a force for really good things, depending on what the intent behind the company, the product, and the service is. Factory farming is capitalism. And plant-based milk is capitalism. Coal-fired power plants are capitalism, and the farmers’ market is capitalism. It’s a system to make a good or a service, and it just depends on what the intention is.
I don’t think it’s the only way to make stuff happen. I think you can do it through nonprofits and do it through the government, and I think in probably most cases it is the most effective, but again, sometimes that effect is a negative one. The most effective way to do something, I do often think, is through capitalism.
I think if someone is motivated to make cultivated meat, and they want to make as much as they can, at the lowest cost they can, so, as many people can buy it, and they can make as much money as they can. I would say, it sounds good because ultimately, you’re going to have a big impact on this planet; I’m gonna be a supporter of yours.
I think cultivated meat, just like electric cars to an extent, will be for people who have a lot of money and who are highly educated initially, there’s just no getting around it because that’s often the deal with any product. That was the deal with cereal. That was the deal with Coca-Cola. That was the deal with computers. That was the deal with the iPhone. That was the deal with the cell phone, right? It often is that initially, but can it cross that bridge from: “Alright, it’s this elite thing and a social club”, to something that’s available to the everyday person in Morgantown, West Virginia, and Birmingham, Alabama, where I was raised, and that will be determined by our company’s ability to actually make a lot at a low cost. If we’re able to do it, it will be out there, but if we’re not able to do it, then, you know, we’ll have fallen short.
Sonalie Figueiras: You sure have tried.
Josh Tetrick: Yeah.
Sonalie Figueiras: Well, on the back of that, then what keeps you up at night? For work, I mean.
Josh Tetrick: You know, it’s just more like mundane things. Like, you know, it could be like a particular technical challenge that we’re having. It could be a hire that we’re trying to make. Or, a restructure of a team
Sonalie Figueiras: So tactical stuff?
Josh Tetrick: Yeah, tactical stuff. I mean, I don’t stay up at night thinking about the lifetime project of cultivated meat, I sort of accept that it is what it is. It’s more of the tactical stuff and the chores that keep me up.
Sonalie Figueiras: What does success look like to you? Do you see yourself being the CEO of Eat Just and GOOD Meat for a good long while? Other than what you want for the industry, which is like, “In a few lifetimes, the majority of meat is made using cellular agriculture.” However, for you personally, what is success? What are you aiming for?
Josh Tetrick: It’s to do everything I can, through the people that we hire, technology that I’m pushing, capital that I’m raising, interviews that I’m giving, to increase the probability that cultivated meat as the main source of meat in the food industry happens sooner. Professionally, using my life in that way gives me a lot of fulfillment. Even though it is really hard, even when there’s only trying, even though it can be really frustrating, even though it can make you nauseous sometimes, I feel that to be useful, to feel like you’re doing everything you can to try and increase the likelihood of something so good happening- that’s what I want, and I hope to be doing this leading the company for a long time. This is where I think I could be the most effective, but yes, I feel like every day, I’m being useful in that way. Just from a professional sense, that is success to me.
Sonalie Figueiras: I love it. I agree. Thank you so much, Josh for an incredible conversation. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Green Queen In Conversation is a podcast about the food and climate story hosted by Sonalie Figueiras, the founder and editor-in-chief of Green Queen Media. The show’s first season, Pioneers of Cultivated Meat, explores cultivated meat, a future food technology on a mission to produce animal protein sustainability. In each of the six episodes, Sonalie interviews the pioneers of the industry, asking the hard questions about one of the most exciting food + climate innovations of our time and sharing the personal story behind each founder’s journey.
Green Queen In Conversation is a co-production from Green Queen Media and Cheeky Monkey Productions. This episode was produced by Joanna Bowers and hosted by Sonalie Figueiras.
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 bunch of vegan steak launches, the EU’s alt-protein commitment, and a new book on cultivated meat.
New products and launches
Apricot kernel cheese for the win! Austrian startup Kern Tec – which upcycles stone fruit pits into ingredients for dairy alternatives – has launched a Kesä vegan cheese line under its consumer-facing brand Wunderkern, available at 500 Blus Plus stores in pesto, tomato-olive and Mountain Fun. It will soon unveil alt-milk too.
Courtesy: Kern Tec
In the US, veteran oil brand Wessondebuted a range of vegan spreadable butters with a base of canola, palm and palm kernel oils. They come in Original and Olive Oil varieties, and will be available starting at Hannaford, Stop & Shop, and retailers in the northeast.
Further north, Canadian plant-based dairy company Bettermoo(d)entered a distribution agreement with United Natural Food Canada to place its functional oat milks in over 5,000 retailers nationwide.
Across the Atlantic, UK oat kefir maker Biotiful Gut Health has launched a line of yoghurts made from gluten-free oats. They will debut at Tesco with 350g pots in Vanilla and Cherry flavours.
Meanwhile, New York-based Culiraw has introduced seven raw vegan cheesecakes, available online and in select stores in NYC, Connecticut and New Jersey, including Green’s Natural Foods, Morton Williams, and Met Fresh Supermarkets.
Elsewhere, German cocoa-free chocolate producer ChoViva has partnered with bakery manufacturer De Beukelaer to release a vegan Cereola cookie, which is stoked at Rewe supermarket. It comes a month after it partnered with Kölln on a cereal range that used its oat- and sunflower-based chocolate alternative.
In the UK, Fruit-tellaannounced it will be launching vegan versions of its popular chewy treats (which contain gelatin) in Strawberry Mix, Duo Stix and Berries & Cherry flavours.
Courtesy: Dawn Foods
Staying in the dessert category, Netherlands-based bakery manufacturer Dawn Foods has unveiled a vegan sponge cake mix for its foodservice clients, which promises to provide the “same functionality, texture and taste experience” as its conventional counterpart.
And in the Netherlands and Belgium, McDonald’s has collaborated with Dutch dairy company FrieslandCampina to reduce GHG emissions from the fast-food giant’s dairy supply chain by 14% by 2025.
In more Dutch news, plant protein company Schouten has launched vegan nuggets for children. The Vegetable Bites contain 46% vegetables and come in kid-friendly shapes, and will be available in retail and foodservice channels.
Swedish furniture giant Ikea, meanwhile, has expanded its plant-based offerings with vegan nuggets too. The frozen wheat-based Slagverk nuggets are available at all Ikea stores in Sweden.
This is part of a wider trend, it would seem, given that the vegan snack category – currently worth 49.5B – is set to grow by 7.9% annually to reach $78B. Meanwhile, another report (using much different metrics, I’m sure) shows that the plant-based steak market was valued at $562.5M last year, and is bound to grow by 6.2% per yet to reach $1.02B in 2032.
Speaking of steak, Chunk Foods is deepening its ties with Lewis Hamilton, it seems. Last month, it established a partnership with Hamilton-backed vegan fast-casual chain Neat Burger. And last weekend, it appeared on the menu at Formula 1 in Austin (as well as the Pro Smoke Show).
Courtesy: Chunk Foods
In Germany, Veganz will begin selling a shelf-stable pea protein beef analogue in December, which can be rehydrated in 10 minutes. The plant-based steak will be priced between €3 and €4 per kg, much cheaper than both conventional and other vegan counterparts.
Meanwhile, Israeli producer Redefine Meat‘s 3D-printed flank steak, beef mince and burgers are now available to foodservice operators in Switzerland, with its pulled meat range and kebab mix to arrive next spring. Its New Meat is also available at vegan butcher shop Butch Bunny in Geneva.
Another Middle Eastern brand, the UAE’s Switch Foods, partnered with Lebanese restaurant chain Al Safadi to offer its plant-based meats on the latter’s menu, which will take shape in the form of fried kibbeh, kabab khashkash, lahem beajine and hummus with meat and fries.
Swedish cultivated meat brand Re:meat has partnered with ICA Gruppen, the largest grocery retailer in the Nordics, to explore consumer attitudes towards the former’s cultured meat.
And now there’s a new book about cultivated meat. Bryant Research founder Chris Bryant, cell ag expert Che Cannon and Mosa Met founder Dr Mark Post co-edited Advances in Cultured Meat Technology, published by Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing.
In the US, comedian and SNL alum Tim Robinson collaborated with Plant Power Fast Food to introduce vegan Coney hotdogs, which – like Robinson – hail from Michigan. These will be available at the latter’s locations through November, until supplies last.
Courtesy: Wagamama
More of a K-dog fan? Wagamama‘s got you covered, with a new Korean-inspired menu unveiled in its UK branches. The restaurant – half of whose menu is vegan – has introduced plant-based K-dogs, king oyster skewers, a tofu hot pot, and a silken tofu gochujang rice bowl, among other items.
Meanwhile, South Korea’s CJ CheilJedang has expanded its ready-to-heat vegan Bibigo dumpling range with Japchae and Green Chilli flavours, starting with the UK, Singapore and Australia.
And in the US, Zenso Labs is making upcycled precision-fermented booze. It reuses spent grains from breweries and distilleries and turns them into ingredients for alcohol and food formulations. It will soon launch a Pear Ginger hard seltzer and a ready-to-drink Moscow Mule SKU.
Funding, M&A and novel tech
In Germany, a three-year research project for cultivated meat has been funded by German cultured fish startup Bluu Seafood and the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL). The former has poured in €760,000, and the latter has invested €500,000, bringing the total financing to €1.3M.
Canadian cultivated meat producer Evolved, meanwhile, has published a paper detailing how it created in-vivo-like tissues in vitro, capitalising on scaffold-free cell sheets.
Also in Canada, the Saskatchewan Food Centre is building an Advanced Food Ingredients Centre for precision fermentation and bioengineering R&D, with a potential capacity of 20,000 litres. It’s set to begin operations this quarter.
Courtesy: Daiya
Another fermentation facility that made the rounds recently was the one vegan cheese giant Daiya invested in, as it looks to develop a next-level version of chickpea-, oat- and coconut-based cheeses, slated for a North American launch by the end of this year.
In more cheese news, UK company Compleat Food Group (which was formed out of a merger between Addo Food Group and Winterbotham Darby in 2021) has acquired London-based artisanal vegan cheese maker Palace Culture.
Policy and petitions
Oatly‘s much-hyped Reddit AMA last Friday – where it invited a Big Dairy exec to co-host the session and answer questions about sustainability and carbon labelling alongside its sustainability director Caroline Reid – saw no one answer its call. But a Scottish dairy farmer did!
The European Parliament last week voted in favour of the Plant Protein Strategy, which calls on the EU – which has had a rocky week as some members have been found in cohorts with Big Ag to suppress green reforms – to boost the production and consumption of sustainable protein crops.
And its former member, the UK, saw a fourth borough endorse calls for a Plant-Based Treaty. London’s Lambeth council will join Haywards Heath, Norwich and Edinburgh in calculating and reducing food emissions and promoting plant-based food accessibility.
Awards, events and platforms
In Australia, SneakQIK, a shopping deals website, has relaunched as a vegan discounts platform, with expansions planned for India, the US, the UK and eventually globally.
Meanwhile, plant-based organisations have joined as strategic partners for a new event called Veg-net, whose first edition will be held on June 5 next year in London. The organisers hope to connect began brands with buyers and industry experts.
If you’ve had too much news and would rather just take a break, there are vegan-friendly rooms waiting for you at the NH Collection hotel in Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah archipelago. Animal-free bedding, plant-based snacks, compostable shower caps and sanitary bags, plastic-free packaging? Sign me up.
Elsewhere, Californian vegan seafood brand Impact Food has been nominated as one of 22 finalists for the 2023 Neptune Award by Ocean Exchange, which recognises sustainable solutions addressing ocean pollution and degradation.
Speaking of awards, TIME magazine has announced its annual Best Innovations list, which includes GOOD Meat‘s cultured chicken, which is one of only two companies to have received regulatory approval for sale in the US. There was also a special mention for Green Wolf‘s Vegami, which is a whole-foods plant-based salami sausage.
And PETA UK has also announced the winners for its 2023 Vegan Food Awards. Winners include M&S, THIS, VFC, Redefine Meat, Honestly Tasty, Sacred Grounds, Greggs, Asda and Flora.
And finally, another famous vegan organisation, Veganuary, has released the trailer for a documentary celebrating 10 years of the movement. It will premiere on November 17.
Want more roundups of alt-protein, plant-based and sustainable food? Stay tuned for next week’s Future Food Quick Bites, published every Wednesday, or get it in your mailbox by signing up for our Alt Protein Weekly newsletter.
South Korean food and drink giant Nongshim is investing ₩10B ($7.4M) in venture funds aimed at incubating food tech startups, particularly those working with cultivated meat.
Nongshim, the company behind the ultra-famous Shin Ramyun noodle brand, will pour the capital into helping discover and foster emerging companies working with the future of food in South Korea, particularly in areas like smart farming, digital transformation and cultivated meat, which it views as the closest and most viable alternative to conventional meat in the future.
The ₩10B ($7.4M) will be split equally into two Seoul-based two startup funds managed by Stonebridge Ventures and IMM Investment, with the food and drink giant aiming to champion trailblazing startups that can transform the food value chain.
Veggie Garden and ‘smart farm’ deals
Courtesy: Nongshim
Nongshim has its own alt-protein brand called Veggie Garden, which makes plant-based products ranging from bibimbap and bulgogi to grilled steak, dumplings and cheese. It also runs Forest Kitchen, a vegan fine-dining restaurant in southern Seoul, which opened in May 2022.
Additionally, the company – South Korea’s largest instant noodle maker – signed deals with the UAE and Saudi Arabia earlier this year to export smart farms to produce South Korean varieties of strawberries all year round. The latter project is worth a potential $30M, and Nongshim plans to generate business opportunities of over $100M with high-value-added crops.
It began investing in startups with the launch of its Nongshim techUP+ programme in 2018, and says the value of the stakes it has invested in has more than doubled. But while its ₩10B investment is a positive move, Nongshim’s sales and net profit in the first half of the year were ₩1.7T ($1.2B) and ₩99B ($72.9M), respectively.
“Investment in startups was decided following internal reviews,” a Nongshim spokesperson told Korea JoongAng Daily. “But we’re investing through specialised investment funds to conduct a more in-depth evaluation and to explore more deeply.”
Plant-based and cultivated meat focus in South Korea
Courtesy: CellMEAT
Cultivated meat is on the rise in South Korea. In February, 28 industry stakeholders signed an MoU to advance the country’s cultured meat industry, while a month later, the North Gyeongsang province opened the North Gyeongsang Cellular Agriculture Industry Support Center. The 2,309 sq m facility was built over six years with a total investment of ₩9B ($7M) with the aim to develop biomaterials and support companies in the cultivated meat sector.
These developments came after the nation’s Ministry of Food and Drug Safety included official guidance for alt-protein in its National Plan 2022, covering the safety, manufacturing processes and regulatory approval of cultivated meat.
And in terms of plant-based food, more and more consumers are adopting vegan food. The Korean Vegetarian Union said that in 2020, there were around half a million strict vegans in the country – a threefold increase from a decade ago. Similarly, 1.5 million people followed vegetarian or plant-forward diets, while nearly 20% of the population (around 10 million) estimated to be flexitarian.
Industry think tank the Good Food Institute, meanwhile, has called South Korea a “global hotbed of alternative protein innovation”, with companies like Unlimeat, Lotteria, Armored Fresh and Yangyoo some of the plant-based leaders joining the aforementioned cultivated meat players in building a thriving industry.
Canadian alt-protein platform Cult Food Science has launched vegan cat treats under its sub-brand Noochies. The new product uses the company’s patented Bmmune nutritional yeast ingredient.
Cult Food Science’s new plant-based cat treats are freeze-dried and said to have “an amino acid profile similar to cuts of chicken or lamb”, alongside “high levels of protein and dietary fibre, and some great B vitamin content”, according to Noochies founder Joshua Errett, who is the VP of product development at Cult Food Science.
Errett claims the product is “first to market” in this segment in North America. He added: “I don’t believe there is a healthier cat snack in the world today.” In addition, Noochies says it uses post-consumer recycled packaging and carbon-neutral shipping for the product.
The cat treats are made with Cult Food Science’s patented Bmmune ingredient, which is a blend of nutritional yeast and fermented fungi – Errett confirmed to Green Queen that Bmmune is a cultivated yeast, as opposed to a wild or Brewer’s yeast, but there’s no cultivated meat in the treats. The ingredient is rich in postbiotic material and polyphenols, which have been found to fight inflammation, rebalance cats’ intestinal health, reduce oxidative stress and even decrease cancer-related bacteria activity.
Noochies’ brand history
Courtesy: Noochies
Noochies was previously a brand asset of BioCraft Pet Nutrition (formerly Because Animals), which was co-founded by Errett and CEO Shannon Falconer. Subsequently, Everett joined Cult Food Science as VP of Product Development, which acquired Noochies and two provisional patents for rehydrated-then-freeze-dried-yeast, probiotic-based pet supplements.
At the time, Falconer said the company aimed to focus on the commercialisation of its cultivated meat tech, having discontinued its nutritional-yeast-based products last year and agreed to sell “all formulations and two provisional patents related to these discontinued products” to Errett, who had departed the company and joined Cult as VP in October 2022.
“Because Animals retains all of its intellectual property relating to cultured meat – which is our core business – and we are committed to revolutionising the pet food industry with this technology,” said Falconer. Earlier this month, the company unveiled an AI and machine learning tool to accelerate R&D and identify cheaper inputs and ingredients, as well as those less likely to raise regulatory concerns – a big step for cultured meat companies.
Alt-protein for pets
Courtesy: BioCraft Pet Nutrition
Noochies isn’t the only Cult brand working on alternative pet food. In August, it partnered with Singapore-based cultured seafood producer Umami Bioworks to unveil Marina Cat, a cultivated pet food brand. It will combine Umami’s cell-cultured red ocean snapper and Cult’s Bmmune ingredient, with aims to begin production later this year, and have a widespread launch in 2024.
“My vision for the future is that we no longer have to slaughter other animals to feed our cats,” Errett said at the time. “This brand brings me one very great step closer to making that a reality.” Other brands working in the cell-based pet food space include Bond Pet Food, which created cultured chicken for pets in 2020, and Wild Earth, which developed a cultivated chicken broth topper for dogs last year.
Wild Earth makes vegan pet food too, a category that features brands like Omni, The Pack, V-Dog, Hownd and Benevo as well, among others. Research has shown that if all the world’s dogs and cats went vegan, it would help feed nearly 520 million people, conserve land the size of multiple countries, and save billions of animals from slaughter. Studies have also eased consumer concerns about the health benefits of vegan food for cats, who have always been known as obligate carnivores.
Last month, a survey of 1,369 cat owners found that cats on a plant-based diet could be healthier than those fed meat, with owners reporting fewer visits to the vet, reduced medication use and assessments of severe illness, and more vets describing vegan cats as healthy – though only 127 cats were on a vegan diet in the study, which is a small sample size.
In 2021, a similar study of 1,026 cats found that 18% of felines (187) who were fed plant-based diets were more frequently reported by guardians to be in very good health. This is translating to consumers too: in the UK, a 2022 survey by The Vegan Society revealed that 40% of owners who feed their cats a plant-based diet do so because they believe it’s healthier.
As for Noochies, which has worked with cultivated proteins previously, Erret says: “I’m mission-driven, for animals and the environment, so everything I do is going to be vegan – until I can get regulatory approval on cell-cultivated meats.”
Months after voting to ban the production and sale of cultivated meat in the country, Italy has withdrawn its notification of the proposed bill to the EU. But while this could spell a victory for alt-protein and a sustainable future food system, it may not all be rosy.
In March of this year, Giorgia Meloni’s newly appointed far-right government proposed a draft law to ban lab-grown food in Italy – which included cultivated meat – to “safeguard our nation’s heritage”. Anyone found to produce or trade these proteins risked facing a €60,000 ban and having their manufacturing plants closed down.
It drew criticism from activists and opposition politicians. Riccardo Magi, president of the left-wing party Più Europa, called it “a new crime” by the government: “They are taking it out on synthetic food and prefer to continue with their reckless prohibition, instead of doing research and developing a technology that could allow us to pollute and kill less.”
Good Food Insitute Europe’s policy head Alice Ravenscroft said the move would shut down the economic potential of this field, hold back scientific progress, and limit consumer choice. “Italy would be left behind as the rest of Europe and the world progresses towards a more sustainable and secure food system. And the 54% of Italians who already want to try cultivated meat would be banned from doing so,” she cautioned.
Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons/CC
Backtracking on proposed cultivated meat ban
Despite the backlash, the Italian senate approved this bill in July, with 60% of senators voting in favour of banning the manufacturing and sale of cultivated meat, claiming it would protect human health and national heritage. The bill still needed to be approved by the Chamber of Deputies, the parliament’s lower house. The proposal was in tandem with a potential ban on the use of meat-related terms on plant-based meat labels.
Italy had submitted what is called a Technical Regulations Information System (TRIS) notification to the EU, which is a procedure that aims to prevent the creation of barriers in EU countries. Essentially, if Italy wants to ban cultivated meat, it needs EU approval, with other members of the bloc having the opportunity to weigh in on the decision as well.
But according to the animal advocacy group Essere Animali, Italy withdrew its TRIS notification on Friday, in light of ongoing parliamentary discussions and potential changes. And while it may be seen as a softening of its stance on alt-protein, it’s likely a way to avoid official rejection from the EU, as it’s understood that Italy knew its proposed ban would be denied by the bloc, with some member states already reacting negatively to the draft measure.
There’s also the fact that due to EU trade laws, Italy’s bill still wouldn’t be able to ban future imports of cultivated meat products, as long as they obtain regulatory approval. The EU has stringent measures around the regulation of cultured meat – classed as “novel foods” – and no company has filed for regulatory approval in the region so far. But it has expressed support for alt-protein and sustainable food production: just last month, for example, the EU Parliament’s Agriculture Committee voted to implement a strategy to increase the production of plant proteins in the EU.
Courtesy: Upside Foods
Anticipating the EU’s rejection, Italy’s withdrawal is being seen as a halt to proceedings, but not necessarily a win for alt-protein. “We are happy to see that the ideological and anti-scientific approach of the Italian government is finding a difficult wall to overcome, so much so that it is forced to do a major about-face,” noted Essere Animali development manager Claudio Pomo.
But he added: “What happened is certainly an important result, but it is not yet a definitive victory, and we must not let our guard down. [Agricultural] minister [Francesco] Lollobrigida has already said that he wants to move forward with this battle, and there will certainly be other moves.”
Robert E Jones, president of industry association Cellular Agriculture Europe, similarly welcomed the news and cautioned that the Italian government will likely continue to pursue a ban. “While it is a positive sign that Italy has withdrawn its TRIS notification, the battle to protect complementary protein innovations is still ongoing,” he told Green Queen.
“We expect the Italian government will soon move forward with its national ban on cellular agriculture and meat terms for plant-based products while evading any scrutiny by the EU Commission,” he added. “As such a move will be a blatant violation of EU law, it is yet another sign that this is all political theatre to fulfil a campaign promise to a vocal minority, and a monumental distraction from the real conversation we need to have about creating a climate-resilient food system in Europe.”
Preserving heritage against food security
So where does that leave Italy and its national heritage? Stefano Lattanzi, CEO of Italian cultivated meat consortium Bruno Cell, told Time that Italy’s ban would damage local innovation, adding that the government’s “frontal attack” makes no sense. “Here in Italy, we are fanatics with our food,” he said. So when politicians use the word ‘synthetic’ – which is incorrect because cultivated meat is real meat – it is something like blasphemy for us.”
This idea of national heritage and pride in its culture was portrayed wonderfully by Marianna Giusti in the Financial Times in March. “There’s a dark side to Italy’s often ludicrous attitude towards culinary purity,” she wrote.
She explained how the archbishop of Bologna suggested adding pork-free tortellini to its San Petronio feast as an inclusive gesture for Muslim residents. Far-right League party leader Matteo Salvini responded by saying: “They’re trying to erase our history, our culture”. This is despite pork not being a tortellini filling until the late 19th century.
Courtesy: Eat Just
Now, as another far-right leader heads the government, Giusti wrote: “Italian food is as much a leitmotif for rightwing politicians as beautiful young women and football were in the Berlusconi era.” In this vein, Lollobrigida suggested that a task force be established to monitor quality standards in Italian restaurants globally, fearing that “chefs may get recipes wrong, or use ingredients that aren’t Italian”.
In a piece titled ‘Lab Meat Skeptics, Please Just Get Out of the Way’, Bloomberg columnist Amanda Little outlined why tradition might need to give way for innovation, with the planet burning and our food system being a primary contributor to it: “We have entered an era of disruption and adaptation that is understandably painful for the food-nostalgic, but unavoidably necessary.”
Let Italians decide what they want from their food
So where does Italy go from here? No one knows for sure yet. What we do know for certain is that the EU itself is lagging behind other governments when it comes to alt-protein regulation. Singapore and the US have already approved the sale of cultivated meat, and Switzerland and the UK are currently considering applications from Aleph Farms – with the latter said to be looking to fast-track the process.
“The EU already has a robust regulatory process in place for confirming the safety of new foods like cultivated meat, and regulators in the United States and Singapore have already found it to be safe,” GFI Europe’s Ravenscroft said. “The government should let Italians make up their own minds about what they want to eat, instead of stifling consumer freedom.”
And Italians shouldn’t worry. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization have both allayed fears and misconceptions about cultivated meat, playing down concerns about tumour formation, cancer and other health ill-effects caused by cell-cultured meat. The negative impact of GMOs and concerns about human infections have been eased in a joint report by the two bodies.
Courtesy: Mosa Meat
Cultural anthropologist and Follow the Future founder Dr Muriel Vernon reasoned how cultivated meat should be thought of as just another part of an animal – one that has never existed. “If we accept the fact that a single animal can be arbitrarily cut up into vastly different price categories based on equally arbitrary cut preferences, then we may not be so far off in adding a new cut that tastes as good as the top existing cut, but appeases our growing appetite for ethics and sustainability,” she wrote.
In another contribution to the tradition vs future debate, Cecilia Manduca, a VC at Talis Capital, compared the ‘BioRevolution’ to the Industrial Revolution. “SynBio allows society to move away from using centralised, huge, polluting factories as primary production facilities, towards a world where primary goods are produced locally, efficiently, sustainably and through waste or organic feedstocks,” she wrote. “Cells can enable us to produce whatever we want, wherever and whenever we need, potentially transforming manufacturing and supply chains as we know them.”
Ahead of the Chamber of Deputies debate last month, GFI Europe’s Italy policy consultant, Francesca Gallelli, said the alt-protein sector will create tens of thousands of jobs and offer opportunities for farmers to diverse and produce high-value proteins. “The government must ensure those jobs are created in Italy, rather than overseas,” she noted. “Without engaging in an open and fully informed debate, Italy will cut itself off from crucial opportunities for sustainable development and economic growth.”
As evidenced by developments around the world, cultivated meat feels inevitable – can Italy and its far-right government put its fork down?
Alt-protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) India has just released its first State of the Industry report for the country and by all accounts, there is much to be optimistic about. We break down the seven key highlights from the country’s smart protein sector.
India is making strong progress when it comes to the alt-protein sector – and this is crucial, given the South Asian country now has the largest population in the world, one which is predicted to continue growing over the next three decades.
It’s also the Asian country requiring the second-highest increase in alt-protein production, with 85% of its protein consumption needing to come from alternative and traditional plant sources (like beans, tofu, tempeh, etc.) if it is to carbonise.
So where does its ‘smart protein’ industry stand, and how far does it have to go? It’s these questions that GFI India addresses in its State of the Industry 2023 report – its first dedicated to the country. Here are seven key takeaways from the research, highlighting early adopters, government support, alt-protein regulation, labelling conventions, and more.
Infographic by Green Queen Media using GFI India data
Plant-based dairy is king, but alt meat shows promise
Courtesy: Kingdom & Sparrow/The Alt Co
There are 113 companies working on plant-based, cultivated and fermentation-derived meat, dairy, seafood and eggs in India. Unsurprisingly – given the country has the largest dairy industry in the world – nearly two-thirds (65.8%) of plant-based businesses are focused on alt-dairy (with almond milk brands topping the list), and 30.1% on vegan eggs.
Meat alternatives only account for 4.1% of all vegan brands in India. There’s a large opportunity here, though, given that vegan chicken is the top product format across the sector (followed by alt-milk), and 77% of Indians consume meat daily, weekly or occasionally. Still, the current market landscape values plant-based dairy (₹250 crores/$30M) 2.5 times higher than meat alternatives (₹100 crores/$12M).
In terms of investment, alt-protein startups (across the three pillars) saw a modest investment of $17M between 2021-22, a small share of the $562M total that was injected into APAC companies in 2022. However, a survey of investors active in or entering the alt-protein sector by GFI showed that 99% of respondents are optimistic about the sector’s potential.
“I believe, with its world-class talent and proven track record of cost-efficient scale-up, India is uniquely positioned to be a smart protein innovation and manufacturing hub,” said Michal Klar, investor and funding partner at Better Bite Ventures. “This is especially relevant for technologies like precision fermentation that can benefit from talent and equipment currently used for biomedical research and production.”
Thanks to exports, India’s international presence is growing
Courtesy: GoodDot
While investment within India might not be too high, Indian alt-protein manufacturers are starting to make an international mark and contributing to the government’s $2T export goal by 2030.
Biotech firm Laurus Bio makes animal-origin-free growth factors, recombinant proteins, and cell-culture media supplements to cater to cultivated meat companies globally and help meet cost and scale requirements.
When it comes to plant-based, Greenest Foods shipped India’s first export consignment of plant-based meat from Gujarat to the US last year, while Wakao Foods shipped one of the largest-ever shipments (13 tons) of jackfruit-based products stateside earlier this year.
There were quite a few exports to Singapore, one of APAC’s alt-protein leaders. Blue Tribe Foods launched its line of burgers, tikkas and alt-meat products across Singapore supermarkets, while Shaka Harry will introduce plant-based meat products to the city-state’s Mustafa Centre. Evolved Foods, meanwhile, is exporting vegan meat alternatives to Singapore and Nepal.
More internationally, BVeg Foods supported Haldiram’s International’s launch of its Plant Perfect alt-protein range in the US, UK, EU and Australia, while shipping 22 tons of frozen vegan beef chunks to the UK in July. And as we reported last week, GoodDot – which has been exporting to Singapore, Canada, Nepal, the UAE, South Africa, Oman and Mauritius – entered the US market, with plans to move into the UK and Europe too.
Meanwhile, Kanpur-based Oatmlk became one of the first Indian plant-based dairy brands to export to the UAE and Singapore – which is significant as it isn’t based in one of the top three metro cities of New Delhi, Mumbai or Bengaluru. “New brands from tier-II and tier-III cities will play an important role in India’s export story in the coming decades,” says GFI India.
Bright visuals and ‘plant-based’ over ‘vegan’: how to nail product packaging
Courtesy: Greenest Foods
Since 2006, food and drink packaging in India has been labelled with green or red dots, signalling whether a product is vegetarian or non-vegetarian (which includes eggs in the country), respectively. But in 2021, the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) introduced a new vegan symbol to help consumers differentiate and identify plant-based products.
GFI India carried out a consumer study to identify packaging cues to help identify vegan food, finding that there’s a gap between comprehension and nomenclature – especially for plant-based dairy, which carries labelling restrictions. But there are certain things brands can still do to make their offerings easily identifiable.
Consumers prefer bright and bold colours with elements of green on the packaging, which they expect to be shaped intuitively (tubs for ice cream, blocks for cheese, etc.). Product imagery on the label is crucial in signalling the nature and taste of the food while mentioning the type of protein helps too. And similarly to global trends, most Indians prefer the term ‘plant-based’ over ‘vegan’.
Like many of their global counterparts, Indians value health above most other criteria when considering smart proteins. In 2021, a Kerry study found that health was the top motivating factor for Indians switching to plant-based food. This is especially true for alt-milk, according to GFI India’s research, with claims like “no added sugar” or “no preservatives” appreciated by consumers.
However, when it comes to meat, taste cues resonated more with consumers. But for both product categories, “high protein” was an important factor. Interestingly, claims about animal cruelty didn’t significantly motivate consumers to eschew animal-based food for vegan alternatives, which are primarily considered substitutes during religious events or festivals when meat consumption is prohibited.
Who is the Indian plant-based consumer, and what’s stopping the rest of the populace?
Courtesy: GFI India
To identify the profile of the early adopters of vegan food in India, GFI looked at consumers who were likely to regularly purchase alt-meat, dairy and eggs, as well as pay more for these products.
The result? Young (aged 25-44), higher income (monthly household income of over ₹50,000/$600), well-educated (college graduates and above), living in urban areas, and flexitarians are the early adopters of plant-based foods in India. Vegan eggs and dairy count vegetarians and non-vegetarians as their target audiences too – and while people aged 18-24 are keen on alt-meat, they’re deterred by the price premium.
Of these early adopters, one in four say they’d consider giving up conventional meat, seafood, dairy or eggs in the future, citing issues like hygiene, smell, ease of cooking and heaviness on the stomach, as well as animal welfare and impact on the climate.
While half of these consumers are aware of plant-based milk, only 30% are familiar with alt-meat and 20% with vegan eggs. And of the households acquainted with these products, 23% have tried milk alternatives (with 43% intending to buy in the future), while only 10% have tried meat analogues (with 33% likely to purchase at some point). Meanwhile, 82% of Indians who have bought plant-based milk in the last six months say they’ll consider buying it again, with repeat purchases of alt-meat coming in at 72%.
Flexitarians are key here: 89% who have bought alt-milk buy conventional dairy as well, and 72% do the same for meat, with protein being a key reason for interest in both product categories (and health is equally important for milk).
Among the barriers to consumer adoption are resistance from family, a perceived ‘unnaturalness’, lack of clarity on health benefits, and taste and price. People over 45 feel these products are not relevant to them and possess a synthetic taste, while product availability is a key hurdle for many Indians.
There is increased government support for alt-protein in India
Map of smart protein startups in India | Courtesy: GFI India
There are strong signs of administrative support and examples of public funding to help propel India’s smart protein sector to the next stage. Within India’s Ministry of Science and Technology, the Science and Engineering Research Board included cultivated meat research under its Competitive Research Grant Programmes and announced a funding call centred on making millet-based meat, egg and dairy proteins.
The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council, meanwhile, has invested in multiple smart protein startups in India via initiatives like the Biotechnology Ignition Grant Scheme.
In March 2022, India’s minister of food processing industries confirmed that smart protein is eligible for financial assistance under the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana, a central government scheme that provides monetary support to develop food processing and preservation infrastructure to set up food processing units.
A month earlier, a Ministry of Commerce department set up the Vegan Committee on Export Standards, Guidelines and Promotion for Vegan Food Products to aid the growth of the plant-based industry and set export guidelines. It’s part of the National Programme on Vegan Products, which aims to make India an export leader in the category.
As for state governments, Maharashtra (where Mumbai is located) included smart protein as a pillar to help each its $1T economy target by 2030. And its deputy chief minister signed a directive for manufacturing hubs that will focus on creating plant-based protein value chains.
“The potential for other state governments to chart a path for the smart protein sector is huge, especially since every state in India is uniquely positioned to benefit from various aspects of the innovation and production of smart protein food value chains,” reads the report.
No cultivated meat applications for regulatory approval yet
Sohil Kapadia and Parini Kapadia, founder of Zero Cow, one of India’s only precision fermentation dairy companies | Courtesy: Zero Cow
In India, the FSSAI is the body responsible for the regulatory framework of foods, including plant-based, cultivated and fermented proteins. The latter two fall under the Food Safety and Standards Regulations set out in 2017, which rule that if a product or ingredient doesn’t have a history of human consumption – or is obtained using new tech with engineering processes that significantly alter its composition – it’s classed as a non-specified or novel food product.
In 2020, the FSSAI formed the Working Group on Cultured Meat with regulatory and scientific experts to study the possible regulatory pathways for cultivated meat in India. So far, it hasn’t received any applications for the approval of cultivated meat or proteins made from biomass fermentation.
However, there has been progress on the precision fermentation front, with Californian pioneer Perfect Day obtaining premarket approval from the FSSAI for its animal-free whey protein after it purchased Sterling Biotech last year. Additionally, the regulatory body has approved the use of mycoprotein derived from Fusarium venenatum (the fungi strain used by Quorn).
There’s a lack of clarity when it comes to plant-based labelling in India
Courtesy: Blue Tribe Foods
Like the EU, the FSSAI prohibits the use of terms like ‘milk’, ‘cheese’ and ‘yoghurt’ on the packaging of dairy alternatives. The regulator has specified that alt-dairy products can’t be considered as milk or milk products.
But in June last year, it finalised its Vegan Foods Regulations, a separate framework for plant-based food in India. Producers must comply with these rules and obtain approval to even label their products as vegan. And while the FSSAI published a list of FAQs for further clarity, it mentions that plant-based dairy and cheese analogues are not eligible for consideration as vegan food.
This makes things confusing for plant-based brands, as many alt-dairy products fall under the confines of the Vegan Foods Regulations and satisfy the definition of a dairy alternative. So it’s not clear whether these analogues can be classed as analogues, leaving companies in a neither-here-nor-there dilemma.
The FAQs also mention that the term ‘vegan’ can’t be clubbed with meat-related terms on product labels, with companies not allowed to make claims comparing alt-meats to their conventional counterparts in any sensory manner.
So while a lot of progress is being made, there are some key challenges for India’s alt-protein industry to overcome. “Building trust in these safe, sustainable, and scalable alternatives to conventional proteins is paramount,” Subhaprada Nishtala, director of ITCFSAN, the FSSAI’s training centre, told GFI India. “We envision a future where innovation, safety, and sustainability coexist harmoniously, enriching the dietary choices of the Indian public. Together, we can chart a path towards a more resilient and diversified protein ecosystem in India.”
Read the full State of the Industry 2023 report by GFI India here.
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 Eleven Madison Park’s Hong Kong pop-up, UK environment secretary Thérèse Coffey’s anti-alt-meat comments, and a host of alt-seafood developments.
New products and launches
Eleven Madison Park, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant once named the world’s best, turned (mostly) vegan in 2021 – but for the milk and honey in its tea and coffee service. Now, it’s crossing continents in its 25th year, partnering with Hong Kong luxury hotel Rosewood on a five-day-long vegan pop-up at its Asaya Kitchen, led by EMP chef-owner Daniel Humm. And in true EMP fashion, the eight-course tasting menu will cost HK$3,998 ($510) plus 10% per person. Go figure.
Also in the restaurant world, popular vegan sushi chain Planta has opened its second outpost in Los Angeles, following the launch of the first one in Marina Bay earlier this year. The new Brentwood location is its 14th across the US and Canada. Another new vegan restaurant in Los Angeles is Ubuntu, a West African restaurant, whose chef is behind the New York vegan soul food eatery Cadence.
Courtesy: Planta
Speaking of plant-based sushi, Konscious Foods has collaborated with Whole Foods Market’s sushi venues on ready-to-eat sushi rolls, which feature the brand’s vegan seafood. The Tuna California and Spicy Sno Crab tolls are available at Whole Foods stores nationwide.
Whole Foods in the UK, by the way, will now feature products from Danish brand PerfectSeason, which makes whole-food plant-based meat, including beetroot patties, mushroom patties, and dill cakes. They come in 200g packs of two patties, with the aim to make vegetables the main dish.
The UK has actually been a hotbed for plant-based news this week. Swiss startup Planted has secured a listing for three products in Tesco: a vegan kebab, and lemon and herb chicken, and a new duck SKU that is exclusive to the UK. The B Corp-certified brand’s products will be available in 350 Tesco stores, joining Holland & Barrett, Morrisons and Planet Organic in its retail roster.
Meanwhile, British chef James Taylor has partnered with Hodmedod’s, a grains and pulses supplier, to include British pulses on the primary school menus he creates. He’ll be using ingredients like carlin peas, flamingo peas and coral lentils (among others) in dishes such as lasagne, shepherd’s pie and chilli. If you have any more suggestions, there’s an open call!
Courtesy: Beyond Meat
And on the heels of its new US ad campaign highlighting its health credentials, Beyond Meat is finally releasing its heart-healthy Beyond Steak in the UK, which will be available for restaurants and chefs to order. There’s no announcement about a retail launch, however.
In the US, frozen food giant Dr. Praeger’s is making a texture play with a new crunchy veggie burger line. Available in Crunchy Cauliflower and Crunchy Southwestern Sweet Potato variants, they’re made from six vegetables and can be found at Whole Foods, Shoprite, HEB, Sprouts and Publix nationwide, after debuting on telemarketing channel QVC last month.
Speaking of frozen foods, Indian plant-based meat company GoodDot is entering the US via a partnership with food exporter and distributor Regal Kitchen Foods. Its vegan chicken tikka curry and butter chicken are currently available via the latter’s website, and will soon appear on supermarket shelves in the US.
Meanwhile, upcycled food producer Supplant Kitchen has updated the recipe for its ultra-popular shortbreads, which contain its Sugars from Fibre ingredient claiming 30-40% less sugar than regular shortbread. Available in classic and chocolate formulations, the packaging has been updated to highlight the health and eco credentials too.
Courtesy: Meati
And Colorado-based Meati – which has had tons going on recently – has now joined the snacking category with a shelf-stable mycelium meat jerky in Original, Peppered and Sweet Chile flavours. It comes just weeks after the company opened its D2C online marketplace and subscription service, promising never-seen-before products.
If you’re a keen ocean traveller, Princess Cruisesis launching several vegan menus across its fleet of 15 ships in response to “surging demand”. Passengers can request plant-based options ahead of the trip – these would include Baja-style cauliflower tacos, green goddess salad with tofu and endive, and “walkaway” ratatouille.
Going back to the seafood realm, US producer Plant Based Seafood Co. has partnered with premium wholesaler Sam Rust Seafood to introduce the former’s vegan range to Sam Rust’s foodservice and retail customers.
Courtesy: Zyrcular Foods
In Europe, Catalan plant-based brand Zyrcular Foods is exhibiting its vegan tuna and salmon, as well as a smashburger, pulled pork and pulled chicken at the ongoing German trade fair Anuga 2023 (October 7-11).
Elsewhere, Singapore’s OnlyEg, owned by Float Foods, is making its Australia debut, seeking foodservice partnerships in Sydney. It makes plant-based egg yolks, poached eggs, tamagoyaki, omelette wraps, egg shreds and patties.
Funding and M&A activity
Superlatus, the new company that recently agreed to acquire Perfect Day’s consumer-facing brand The Urgent Company, has now entered an agreement to purchase plant-based dairy and egg company Spero, which will join Coolhaus, Modern Kitchen, Brave Robot and more under The Urgent Company umbrella. Next year, Spero will launch mozzarella sticks and shreds, as well as Cheddar shreds.
Courtesy: Spero Foods
Meanwhile, months after confirming its exit from the dairy category, Finnish company Fazer is considering changes to its plant-based dairy production due to a ‘slowdown’ in the sector’s growth. It’s looking to make its Sweden factory the hub for oat milk manufacturing, while its Finnish facility would focus on oat yoghurt – this could affect 133 employees, with 93 positions possibly being terminated.
Also in the dairy category, Spain’s Pascual Innoventures and Eatable Adventures have launched the third edition of Mylkcubator: More Than Mylk, an accelerator for cellular agriculture companies. Startups that were part of its previous editions include Novo Dairy, Zero Cow Factory, Miruku and Maolac, and have generated a total value of $107M. It has opened calls for this year’s incubator programme.
And in Barcelona, Japanese tofu maker Someno’s Tofu Co. – which opened its first overseas branch in the city in February – has reported a sales growth of 179% in the last eight months.
Speaking of soy-based protein powerhouses, UK tempeh maker Better Nature has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs with a £1M goal. It comes months after it launched a £3M Series A round – and yesterday, it emerged that the brand is the UK’s top-scoring meat-free B Corp, with an impact score of 99.7 (20% higher than the sector average).
Another company celebrating a milestone is Omni, the UK vegan pet food company, which says it has served over a million plant-based dog meals since its founding in 2020 and has seen a sales rise of 60% since the beginning of the year.
Courtesy: Omni
New Zealand-based NewFish, meanwhile, which has developed an 80%-concentrate marine whey protein from microalgae, gained investment from Oslo-based VC firm Katapult. It will join 22 startups in the latter’s accelerator programme, after being in the top 1% of 2,500 candidates and valued at NZ$10M ($6M).
In other startup news, the Vegan Women Summit Pathfinder competition has just announced its top 10 finalists for this year with startups working on everything from alt-fats to mushroom-centric meat-free ranges. The founders of Liven Proteins Corp, Kula Foods, Big Mountain Foods, Nud Fud (all Canada), Lypid, Tiamat Sciences, FoodNerd (all US), Alver (Switzerland), Poseidona (Spain), and Time Travelling Milkman (the Netherlands) will be pitching to the jury on November 1.
Policy and research
Did you hear that plant-based is good for you and the planet? Well, now, even one of the EU Commission’s scientific advisors is saying that. Eric Lambin, co-author of a study earlier this year that highlighted how the meat and dairy lobby are blocking the rise of alt-protein, is calling on the EU to adopt policies that will help drive this shift towards a more sustainable food system.
And speaking of people who used to be in the EU, the UK’s environment secretary Thérèse Coffey recently attacked plant-based meat at a Conservative Party Conference, saying they “might be okay” for astronauts. In an open letter, Plant Based News co-founder Robbie Lockie criticised her remarks: “Your dismissive attitude towards plant-based meats is not only misinformed but incredibly irresponsible… Your lack of environmental foresight is not merely disappointing; it’s a dereliction of your duty to both the public and the planet we inhabit.”
Courtesy: World Economic Forum/CC
Elsewhere, Chinese impact investment firm Dao Foods has released a new report highlighting the potential of fermentation in novel protein adoption in the country, examining its history of biomanufacturing infrastructure development, supportive government policies, and the opportunities and challenges faced by the sector.
In Asia, the industry think tank the Good Food Institute APAC has published its first Korean-language State of the Policy report, highlighting how the South Korean government is accelerating the development of cultivated meat and other alt-proteins via strategic investments and collaborations.
And in further Asian news, alt-protein advocacy non-profit ProVeg International has opened a new office in Malaysia, its 12th branch across the globe. The organisation is also introducing V-Label to the southeast Asian country.
Novel tech and manufacturing news
SIngapore-headquartered plant-based meat company TiNDLE Foods, which has made a wave of headlines over the last year, recently opened an R&D centre in Nijkerk, the Netherlands, complementing its existing Chicago and Singapore. The company announced another milestone, its TiNDLE Nuggets, Wings, or Tenderslanded at Whole Foods in the UK.
On the other end of the spectrum, US meat giant Tyson Foods has laid off a reported 250 employees at a poultry processing plant in North Carolina in response to weak consumer demand, inflation and fluctuating prices. Prior to this, Tyson had already announced the closure of six poultry processing plants this year.
In new tech developments, Israeli nutri-tech startup Novella is unveiling its new line of berry-derived bioactive at the Las Vegas trade show SupplySide West (October 23-27). It’s in the advanced stages of making intact-cell berry compounds grown outside of the plant using “novel, precision-controlled-environment technology”.
Courtesy: Veg of Lund
Meanwhile, Sweden’s Veg of Lund – the company behind the Dug potato milks that caused a stir upon launch in 2021 – has received a notice of intention from the US Patent and Trademark Office, which is set to approve its application for a “vegan potato emulsion”, clearing the way for launch stateside. The company already holds similar patents in Sweden, Europe and Canada, and has active applications in Australia, China, India, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, Hong Kong, and the UAE.
Finally, Chilean food tech startup NotCo – the company behind the AI-powered range of plant-based milks, mayo and burgers – has been named a Climate Tech Company to Watch by the MIT Technology Review for its potential to reduce emissions and address the challenges posed by global warming.
Want more roundups of alt-protein, plant-based and sustainable food? Stay tuned for next week’s Future Food Quick Bites, published every Wednesday, or get it in your mailbox by signing up for our Alt Protein Weekly newsletter.
Wanda Fish, the Israeli startup making cultivated whole-cut bluefin tuna, has raised $7M in a seed funding round to accelerate production and scalability. The company is planning for regulatory approval in the US in 2025, and says it will launch in the market the year after.
The latest cash injection brings Wanda Fish’s total financing to $10M. The latest funding round was led by Dutch aquaculture investment fund Aqua-Spark and joined by returning pre-seed investors The Kitchen Hub by the Strauss Group, Peregrine Ventures, LLC, Pico Venture Partners, MOREVC, and CPT Capital, LLP. The announcement came the same day BlueNalu, a fellow cultured bluefin tuna maker, announced its $33.5M Series B raise.
Founded in 2021 as a joint venture between Israeli food tech incubator The Kitchen Hub and biotech innovation expert Daphna Heffetz, Wanda Fish makes whole-cut filets of cultivated seafood. The company started with bluefin tuna, a fish species that is sought-after for its flavour, texture and nutritional attributes. The premium product is used in high-grade sushi and sashimi restaurants across the world– with Asia responsible for over 80% of its global consumption.
But bluefin tuna supply can be limited and extremely variable in quality, and it faces declines in stocks due to overfishing and illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing, according to BlueNalu. Wanda Fish adds that further demand is driving the species towards endangerment and has led to governments placing quotas to limit its fishing. Moreover, tuna is one of the most polluted fish in the oceans, often contaminated with plastic debris and extremely high levels of heavy metals like mercury.
How Wanda Fish makes cultured bluefin tuna
CourtesyWanda Fish
Wanda Fish, which is still in relatively early stages, says it has made progress on several key breakthroughs to develop a cell-cultured whole-cut bluefin tuna prototype. This includes forming a 3D filet structure using bluefin tuna cells, differentiated into both muscle and fat tissues. The startup is using animal-free growth mediums and custom bioreactors as they will be instantly scaleable, when appropriate, and allow for costs to remain palatable.
With its proprietary tech, the company can control fat levels (which is key as the fish is renowned for its balance of fat and protein). This can help develop a diverse range of filet cuts, including the premium tuna belly cut called toro that BlueNalu is working on (which plans to open a commercial-scale facility by 2027).
In March 2022, Wanda Fish entered a licensing agreement with Tufts University, gaining exclusive access to the latter’s IP surrounding cultivated fish development, created by cellular agriculture expert David Kaplan. As part of the collaboration, the company will support a two-year research programme by the university into the production of fish cells.
“We start with a single, one-time sample of a real native fish muscle and fat tissues,” Kaplan said at the time. “We then pursue the replication of the biological growth of fish, with the nutritional attributes, including protein and omega-3 content, as well as the flavour and textural properties.”
Price parity and regulatory approval
“By integrating innovative proprietary applications from multiple disciplines, including cell culture, biotechnology, food tech, and culinary design, we will produce a versatile range of fish species to satisfy all preferences, at affordable prices, and with uncompromising quality,” Wanda Fish CEO Heffetz had added. It’s worth noting that while cost continues to be one of cultivated meat’s biggest challenges, bluefin tuna’s premium position means it wouldn’t carry the same price differences as cultured alternatives to beef, pork or chicken.
Heffetz told TechCrunch that Wanda Fish expects to obtain regulatory approval from the USDA and other agencies in early 2025, and plans to enter foodservice by 2026. “We will now scale up production and work on the cost parity. We will also collaborate with big food companies for distribution. Our core technology is being done in-house, but we need to collaborate to get to market as fast as possible.”
“We are excited and feel incredibly fortunate to collaborate with Aqua-Spark in propelling our venture forward,” Heffetz said in a statement. “We are on a shared mission to improve the global food value chain, creating a tasty, more sustainable future for all. This financial backing by leading global venture funds gives us significant leverage to make sustainably cultivated, cruelty-free, and ocean-friendly bluefin tuna a reality.”
Chen Galili via Wanda Fish
Growing investment in cultivated seafood
“Wanda Fish is transforming visionary ideas into a tangible, cutting-edge product that is just steps away from reaching its prototype,” said Jonathan Berger, CEO of The Kitchen Hub. “This is credited to a skilled and ambitious multinational team led by Daphna Heffetz that is undoubtedly poised for a resounding success story in the thriving alternative protein space; this spells good news for an overburdened marine ecosystem.”
Wildtype (from California) secured the largest-ever cultivated seafood investment with a $100M Series B for its cell-based salmon in 2022. Meanwhile, China’s Avant closed a $10.8M Series A round the same year, while in 2021, Singapore’s Shiok Meats closed an oversubscribed bridge round that brought its total financing to $30M – the cultured crustacean player counts Aqua-Spark as a backer too. Earlier this year, Berlin-based Bluu Seafood secured $17.5M in a Series A raise with the aim to launch in Singapore next year.
US-cultivated seafood producer BlueNalu has closed a $33.5M Series B funding round and extended partnerships with legacy seafood leaders in APAC to bring its cell-cultured bluefin tuna to market once it receives regulatory approval.
BlueNalu, whose first product is a whole-muscle bluefin tuna, says the new funds will help it scale and commercialise its alt-seafood. In 2021, it received a record-breaking $60M investment – the largest sum for a cultivated seafood company at the time. This followed a $20M Series A round in 2019 and a $4.5M seed funding round the year before.
While the details of the Series B raise are under wraps, it did include VC fund Agronomics, which has previously invested in cellular agriculture companies like Mosa Meat, Meatable, The Every Co and Formo. Agronomics has now invested a total of $8M across the seed and Series A rounds, and in a pre-Series B convertible note that has now transferred into preferred shares. This means it holds a 5.12% equity stake in BlueNalu.
Profitability and commercial production
BlueNalu plans to begin construction on its commercial-scale facility in 2026 | Courtesy: BlueNalu
The funding news comes on the heels of the Californian company extending its partnerships with Asian seafood giants Pulmuone (South Korea), Mitsubishi (Japan) and Thai Union (Thailand). BlueNalu partnered with the latter two in April 2021 to accelerate the launch of its alt-seafood products in the APAC region.
Toro, the fatty part of bluefin tuna belly, is a premium sushi- and sashimi-grade seafood product, with its limited supply making it highly sought after. But BlueNalu says it can be extremely variable in quality and sensory attributes and faces steep declines in fish stocks due to overfishing and illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing.
While Bluefin currently operates out of a 38,000 sq ft pilot plant in San Diego that has the capacity to produce enough seafood for a small-scale launch, it hopes to begin construction on a large commercial facility in 2026, with plans to start production 18 months later. It announced these plans last year, claiming the 140,000 sq ft plant will be able to produce six million lbs of seafood once operational.
Simultaneously, it demonstrated a projected 75% gross margin within the first year of the large-scale facility being operational, via an in-depth techno-economic analysis. Since bluefin tuna toro is already a prized product with a premium price, a cultivated alternative would not carry the same cost difference as meats like beef or chicken.
BlueNalu confirmed that it has developed hundreds of cell lines for eight different finfish species, with ongoing projects looking to expand into other premium seafood categories as well.
Asia focus and regulatory approval
Originally, the company planned to introduce its cultivated tuna to the US foodservice sector in late 2021 and has looked into opportunities for a European launch through a partnership with frozen foods leader Nomad Foods. But it has magnified its focus on Asia now, with the renewal of its collaborations with the three seafood giants, as the region accounts for over 80% of global bluefin toro consumption.
“We are honoured to deepen our collaborations with Mitsubishi, Pulmuone and Thai Union, visionary partners who share our commitment to driving innovation and shaping the future of the seafood industry,” said BlueNalu CEO and president Lou Cooperhouse. In January 2022, the company also entered a deal with Food & Life Companies, Japan’s largest sushi restaurant chain.
“These extended partnerships in the APAC region underscore our dedication to working collaboratively with local experts in each region that we target, and our ultimate goal to provide our customers with healthy and trusted seafood options that have superior product benefits and align with evolving market conditions.”
Asia is home to the first country to approve the sale of cultivated meat, with Eat Just getting clearance to market its cell-based chicken in Singapore in 2020. Earlier this year, the US became the second, with USDA approval granted to Eat Just and Upside Foods. And in Europe, Israeli-cultivated meat producer Aleph Farms filed for approval in Switzerland and the UK earlier this year. BlueNalu is in the process of evaluating market strategies and reviewing regulatory frameworks to facilitate its commercial launch.
Wildtype (also Californian) surpassed BlueNalu’s record to secure the largest-ever cultivated seafood investment with a $100M Series B for its cell-based salmon in 2022. Meanwhile, China’s Avant closed a $10.8M Series A round the same year, while in 2021, Singapore’s Shiok Meats closed an oversubscribed bridge round that brought its total financing to $30M. And earlier this year, Berlin-based Bluu Seafood secured $17.5M in a Series A raise with the aim to launch in Singapore next year.
There have been various product launches too, including Canadian brand Seed to Surf‘s whole-food plant-based snow crab and whitefish, South Korean producer Unlimeat‘s upcycled vegan tuna, Singapore-based HAPPIEE‘s vegan shrimp and squid in the UK, and Austrian company Revo Foods‘ 3D-printed whole-cut salmon.
Following its first tasting event in May, which involved retail partners and Singapore’s Economic Development Board, Dutch cultivated pork producer Meatable hosted a second such session last week for the media and stakeholders. It demonstrated its cell-cultured pulled pork and sausage products, which it plans to launch in the city-state in mid-2024.
Meatable’s meat alternative is a hybrid cultivated and plant-based product, which it has developed in partnership with Singapore-based Love Handle. The tasting event, held at Love Handle Labs Innovation Centre at The Arts House, featured a version that was one-third cultured meat and two-thirds plant-based, after taste-testing prototypes containing anywhere between 10-50% of cell-based meat.
“We are still in the process of optimising our products and trying out different recipes,” Meatable COO Carolien Wilschut tells Green Queen. “Each recipe is like a puzzle, where all components need to complement each other perfectly. We will keep on working on this to make sure we have the perfect recipe ready for the launch.”
“At our last tasting, participants tasted a hybrid sausage with 33% cultivated meat. The feedback on this was already very positive, but we’re always looking to make our products even better.”
Meatable described the tasting event as “successful”, having received some “invaluable feedback” on the taste and texture of its meat. In her review for The Straits Times, senior environment correspondent Lynda Hong wrote it “can be hard for someone to tell the difference between traditional pork and [Meatable’s] cultivated pork”.
As for the pulled pork, she said it “lacks the fibrous texture, dissolving in the mouth faster than traditionally farmed pork”, but the difference was masked by the sauce, the taco it was wrapped in, and the meat’s own porky flavour. “I never really tried cultivated meat before, and I think it tastes very much like the real stuff,” Hong was quoted as saying by Meatable.
Courtesy: Meatable
“I feel the product is really, really interesting,” said Daniele Sperindio, Michelin-starred chef at Italian restaurant Art. “Depending on the application, if I wasn’t told, I could be even potentially fooled to think it’s simply pork, like shredded pork and so on.” Meanwhile, Stephan Zoisl from Chef’s Table restaurant, said: “Did I like the cultivated meat? Definitely! It’s a new revolution, kind of. Just from a point of flavour, it tastes like pork, I mean, so it does taste like meat. Definitely, I liked that.”
“We are delighted to have delivered this tasting event in Singapore and humbled by the responses we got,” said Meatable co-founder and CEO Krijn de Nood. “It is a great way for us to collect their feedback and optimise our products even further.”
The path to regulatory approval
Meatable announced it will look to conduct more tastings of its products, both in Singapore and elsewhere. Each event requires safety approval by the Singapore Food Agency, which has “stringent safety requirements and a clear framework of criteria that companies need to meet”. Earlier this year, it collaborated with Mosa Meat, HollandBIO and the Dutch government to create a ‘code of practice’ facilitating cultivated meat tastings in the Netherlands – now, it aims to host its first tasting in its home country late this year.
The news comes just two months after Meatable raised $35M in Series B financing, bringing total investment to $95M to date. The company – which has already applied for regulatory clearance in Singapore (which is one of only two countries that currently allow the sale of cultivated meat, alongside the US) – is aiming for a launch in restaurants in mid-2024. “By that time, we aim to have received approval for commercial sale,” says Wilschut.
In October 2022, Meatable partnered with Singapore’s ESCO Aster, the only regulator-approved contracted cultivated meat manufacturing facility in the world, in its bid towards regulatory approval. De Nood told Green Queen in August that the company will look to expand to the US after the Singapore launch, which Wilschut confirmed.
Courtesy: Meatable
“We are taking this process step by step, and will use our experience in Singapore to guide us in other countries,” she said. “After Singapore, we are planning to expand to the US. Depending on regulatory developments elsewhere, we will update our strategy accordingly. “
“In order to gain regulatory approval in the US, we’re working with the relevant US experts and authorities on this matter – including the US Food and Drug Administration and the United States Department of Agriculture,” de Noord said in August. “Our application in Singapore gives us useful points of reference as well.”
Patented tech enables faster cultivated meat production
To produce its cultivated pork, Meatable employs a proprietary tech called Opti-ox, which helps it avoid using the controversial fetal bovine serum. Usually, immortalised cell lines require an alteration of the cells to allow them to multiply indefinitely, but Meatable uses pluripotent stem cells (PSCs), which “have the natural ability to keep on multiplying and to do so rapidly” – and these double in just 24 hours.
It can be more challenging to change PSCs from stem cells into specialised cells like muscle or fat, but the Opti-ox tech helps produce real muscle and fat cells that can fully differentiate in eight days, which is 30 times faster than it takes to rear a pig for pork on farms. This technique is paired with a perfusion process allowing Meatable to work in a continuous cycle to produce high cell densities.
“This means we can grow a lot of cells in our bioreactors, and harvest cultured meat from the reactors continuously. This is a great step forward as it increases productivity and makes the process easy to scale,” explains de Nood. “Altogether, this means that when it comes to making real cultivated meat, we have the tools to make the process extremely efficient and one that can scale to serve customers around the world.”
Courtesy: Meatable
Apart from the ESCO Aster production site and the co-manufacturing facility with Love Handle, Meatable has a plant in the Netherlands too. “We are in the process of moving to our new facility in Leiden,” Wilschut tells Green Queen. “In our previous location, we were working with 50-litre bioreactors, but here we have the possibility to work with larger bioreactors and therefore produce more product. This is an important step for us in scaling up. Next to that, we have started production on the ground in Singapore.”
The tasting is a major step forward in its journey to launch commercially. “This is also an important step towards full regulatory approval for sales in Singapore,” says de Nood. “All this helps us move closer to fulfilling our mission to satisfy the world’s appetite for meat without harming people, animals, or the planet.”
In our new 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 Australia’s meat reduction, Kellogg’s omnivore-targeting plant-based burger, and the Canadian dairy sector’s attack on vegan alternatives.
New products and launches
Aussie brand Next! Foods has launched a new line of premium, Michelin-starred-chef-created vegan pasta sauces – a Bolognese and carbonara featuring its soy protein mince and bacon, respectively – in over 500 Coles supermarket stores. It plans for an international expansion soon.
Across the Pacific is another plant-based sauce by fast-food giant Taco Bell. The limited-edition vegan nacho cheese sauce will come as part of its Nacho Fries menu offering and will be available at participating US stores from October 12. The sauce was previously part of Taco Bell’s ultra-popular Vegan Crunchwrap.
The US has also seen what is my personal favourite launch news of all time. Lindt has launched vegan, oat-milk-based versions of its legendary Lindor chocolate truffles. They come in classic and dark varieties, and use almond butter, and oat and rice extract powders as the base. Details about listings are scant, but the Lindor Non-Dairy Oatmilk Chocolate Candy Truffles are available at the Lindt USA retail stores and online marketplace, as well as Safeway locations. If you’re smart like I am, you’ll buy the 800-piece pack.
In the North, Hershey’sdebuted its first vegan chocolate range in Canada. The Oat Made chocolates come in Creamy and Almond & Sea Salt flavours, with a base of almonds, oats and rice, and are available in major grocery stores across Canada.
Courtesy: Hershey’s
Another confectionery release is Colorado-based Trupo Treats‘ vegan chocolate nougat bars. They come in classic and peanut-caramel flavours. The company had set a pre-order sales target of at least $50,000 (pushing to $100,000) by November 1, and it’s already halfway there, so it seems likely these will go into production soon.
Alt-dairy launches have spanned continents, with German oat milk maker Velike!launching a chilled SKU in returnable glass bottles. The Not M’lk is available in 1.5% and 3% fat options, and Velike! claims it is the first refillable plant-based milk on refrigerated shelves. (Though I wonder what NotCo and a certain alt-dairy giant have to say about the name.)
Within this sphere, British cheese maker Cathedral City has expanded its vegan range with an extra mature block and a Cheddar spread. The line was introduced last year with plant-based Cheddar blocks, slices and grated SKUs.
And while you’ll normally associate it with a milky breakfast, Kellogg’s has launched a new plant-based burger under its Morningstar Farms brand. It’s an evolution of a toxic relationship – the previous Incogmeato vegan burger was discontinued, and Morningstar was almost spun off – but the new ‘premium’ Steakhouse Style quarter-pounders hopes to target omnivores with its release into Walmart, Publix and Target stores
Courtesy: Morningstar Farms
Speaking of burgers, British chain The Beefy Boys has unveiled its first meatless option, a mushroom-based patty. The burgers do contain dairy cheese by default – so if you happen to visit its Hereford (where it trialled the product in July), Cheltenham and Shrewsbury locations, be sure to ask them to hold the cheese.
Dutch company NoPalm Ingredients, which makes microbial palm oil alternatives, has produced a prototype boullion powder using the alt-fat, which is upcycled from Unilever’s ice-cream production sidestreams. And in another collaboration, it has taken one of Colgate-Palmolive’s byproducts and turned it into a personal care ingredient for future use in the consumer good giant’s soap bars.
In terms of product listings, UK plant-based meal kit brand Grubbyhas made its retail debut in Tesco, the country’s largest retailer, with Thai green curry, coconut dal and gnocchi puttanesca nationwide. Additionally, the B Corp startup’s D2C orders allow you to track the carbon footprint of the meals against their conventional meat equivalents.
Courtesy: Grubby
In Asia, Indian plant-based meat brand Greenest has collaborated with restaurant chain Hard Rock. Its location at Chandigarh Tricity sees a new vegan menu with Greenest’s plant-based kebabs, burgers and spring rolls.
And in Hong Kong, vegan pork maker Plant Sifu has extended its partnership with flag carrier Cathay Pacific – weeks after introducing 16 meat-free dishes on select routes – on a six-month trial that will see in-flight meals like braised egg tofu with plant-based mince and shiitake mushrooms and wok-fried mince with Thai basil, morning glory and sambal make it onto Economy and Premium Economy class menus in select long-haul flights.
Funding and M&A Activity
Californian food tech startup Novel Farmshas been awarded the Small Business Innovation Research Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation, which is worth $999,967 over two years. Known for its cultivated pork loin that uses novel microbial fermentation and tissue engineering tech, the funding will help the company scale up its proprietary scaffolding platform.
Meanwhile, Finnish alt-dairy brand Oddlygood has acquired Nordic brand Planti, which it claims makes it the market leader in vegan “spoonable snacks” in Sweden and cooking products in Finland. The companies haven’t disclosed the amount of the deal – but Oddlygood recorded a turnover of €23.5M last year, while Plantu made €10.9M.
Courtesy: Oddlygood
Leading alt-protein non-profit ProVeg International has announced its Incubator’s 11th cohort, welcoming eight startups all pushing towards a sustainable food system. These include Allium Bio, Marinas Bio (both Singapore), Poseidona, Guimarana (both Spain), Cellva Ingredients (Brazil), Livestock Labs (United States), Food 4 You (Argentina) and Ex Seed (Bulgaria).
Policy and research
ProVeg also responded to a report published by the UK’s Climate Change Committee last month, which called for financial incentives for plant-based foods to make them more “attractive, accessible and affordable”. ProVeg welcomed the report and pushed the spotlight on to Rishi Sunak, who it said is “in danger of going down in history as a leader who failed to act in the best interests of our children and the next generation by taking the necessary steps to reduce dangerous greenhouse gas emissions”.
Meanwhile, a new study by Australia’s Griffith University found that nearly a third of respondents had reduced their meat consumption in the last year, while only 3.3% had increased it. Health, environment and animal welfare were the top three reasons, as is standard, as nearly 14% reported a wish to transition towards a fully vegan diet.
Courtesy: Quorn
And if you eat vegan food, you may have encountered Quorn at some point, the British meatless pioneer that has been championing mycoprotein since the 80s. A new study in the European Journal of Nutrition has found that eating Quorn’s meat alternatives for two weeks can lower LDL (bad) cholesterol by 12%, total cholesterol by 7%, and reduced weight circumference by almost 1cm compared to red meat consumption.
Elsewhere, Chinese alt-protein impact investment firm Dao Foods released a new white paper assessing fermentation-based proteins in the country. It examines the challenges the sector faces, alongside the advantages of fermentation in China, pathway options for startups, opportunities to catalyse startups, as well as engagement strategies.
And in the latest chapter of the labelling battle, the Dairy Farmers of Canada are allegedly attempting block a trademark application for the term ‘Dare to be dairy-free’ by New York-based vegan brand Treeline Cheese. The latter calls it an “anti-competitive attempt to impede the sale” of its plant-based dairy alternatives, whose packaging label the dairy lobby argues “deceptively misdescribes” the product.
Courtesy: Treeline Cheese
In more positive labelling news, Chilean plant-based foundation Vegetarianos Hoy is celebrating the certification of 2,000 products with its Sello Vegano accreditation as well as the V-Label, which is represented by the organisation in Latin America across seven countries.
Meanwhile, US-based MycoTechnology, which makes mycelium ingredients for protein powders, commissioned a study that found only 17% of vegans made up the 725 consumers of plant-based protein powders it surveyed. It reiterated that while being free from sugar and artificial sweeteners, GMOs, preservatives and colouring is key, the most important factor for customers remains taste.
Novel tech news
Israeli biotech firm ProFuse Technologyannounced a breakthrough in its muscle tissue tech that it says will transform the cultivated meat industry. It has created a scaffolding 3D growth technology that can combine with cell culture media and growth protocols to speed up muscle growth by fivefold, allowing cultured meat to be produced within 48 hours – which is 80% faster than usual according to ProFuse.
Danish microbial tech company Novozymes, meanwhile, has unveiled Vertera ProBite, a B2B clean-label ingredient formulated to improve the texture and mouthfeel of plant-based meat. Crucially, it has received regulatory approval as a processing aid.
In a cross-continent deal, Iceland’s ORF Genetics and South Korea’s SeaWith have signed an MoU to boost cultivated meat production using the former’s MESOkine animal-free growth factors made from barley. SeaWith aims to launch cultivated meat products under its Welldone brand to the market by 2025.
Finally, Cargill, the world’s third-largest meat producer, has opened a European Protein Innovation Hub, enabling its customers to co-create protein-rich menu strategies in test kitchens and a pilot plant. It’s part of a €50M investment into the company’s Saint-Cyr en Val site in France and will allow customers to create protein products based on ideas from Cargill’s chefs. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Want more roundups of alt-protein, plant-based and sustainable food? Stay tuned for next week’s Future Food Quick Bites, published every Wednesday or get it in your mailbox by signing u to our Alt Protein Weekly newsletter.
Californian startup Marinas Bio is developing a cultivated alternative to one of the world’s most premium foods, caviar. While cost will continue to be a major barrier for cell-cultured meat and seafood as companies are still far from mass scale, luxury foods may be the ideal niche to test consumer appetite for higher-priced cultivated alternatives.
While caviar is not a food most of us eat regularly, these high-priced fish eggs command high prices. But caviar’s supply chain is less than desirable. Also known as salted roe, they are acquired from slaughtered sturgeons and have always come at a high price, both ethically and environmentally. In fact, the high demand for caviar, an elite food associated with wealth and Michelin-starred restaurants, has meant that sturgeons are today the most critically endangered species on Earth, according to the WWF.
That – and the sometimes inferior quality of caviar – is why Allan Leung, a former seafood farm worker who had a short sting as the interim CFO of cultivated fish startup Avant Meats, is working on cultivated roe at his new startup Marinas Bio.
There are three sturgeon species that are used to make caviar: Beluga, Iscveitra and Sevruga. When asked which one the company is working on, Leung doesn’t specify, saying only: “We are working on multiple species based on CITES and other relevant regulations.” He adds that the cells are “collected directly from aquatic animals using [a] sterile technique”.
Cultivated seafood’s scalability challenges
Courtesy: Shiok Meats
Cultivated seafood is a complex sector, with far fewer players than meat, and a much more complicated R&D process, mostly because there is close to no previous research on sea species stem cells, as Sandhya Sriram, co-founder and CEO of cultivated seafood Shiok Meats, told Green Queen founding editor Sonalie Figueiras in a podcast.
“Around last year, we realised, okay, seafood is gonna take longer than [what we thought],” she said. “Seafood in general doesn’t have any background research… [Shiok] went into it knowing that it’s going to take time, but we thought it would be about four or five years until we figured it out. But last year – our fourth year – we said: ‘Okay, let’s take a pause here. We have tried as much as we can with the scale, and it’s not working.’”
While Shiok remains committed to building out crustacean cell lines, it shifted focus to bringing cultivated beef to market and getting regulatory approval (the company Gaia Foods in 2021). Last month, meanwhile, Shanghai-based CellX teased that the team was getting closer to large-scale production of cultivated seafood – but it’s not there yet.
And while Leung says the development of cell lines for fish eggs will be easier than species like shrimp or crab, he did not go into specifics about the company’s R&D progress, adding that Marinas had “not made an announcement of cell line data yet” and has not “made a public announcement of our R&D progress to-date”. Moreover, he confirmed that the company has not had any public tastings yet.
“Single-cell roe is easier to scale than meat. A serving of steak consists of multiple cell types and billions of cells. A serving of caviar consists of hundreds of individual egg cells,” he explains. “In cell agriculture, biotechnology can make it possible to use one fish to produce caviar repeatedly forever. We could shorten the production cycle from years to months and develop protocols to improve quality, consistency, and shelf life.”
Early days for Marinas Bio
Funding-wise, the company has managed to get support from the ProVeg Incubator and SeaAhead, and Leung said the Marinas is supported by Trendlines AFIC too. He says the team is looking to “raise additional rounds upon our next scientific milestones”. Asked what and when these might be, Leung said: “Additional milestones will be announced via LinkedIn.”
The company is just over a year old and is currently a team of 3, including Leung. He co-founded it with Sally Davis, a veterinarian with 20 years of aquatic animal and biomedical research experience, and Elizabeth Mojica, a scientist who has been working on fish cell cultures for eight years.
Based near Sacramento, which Leung says is a strategic choice – “in the heart of the US sturgeon aquaculture industry” – the team currently sits in a co-working lab “for cost efficiencies”.
Leung’s seafood journey
In a social media post explaining his origins, Leung says he grew up eating seafood in Hong Kong and entered the fish farming industry after university.
“I watched these lively animals grow from the tiniest fingerlings into a thriving school of fish. One day, however, this school of happy fish was suddenly caught in the net, [and] kidnapped in the back of a boat. Darkness fell on these animals,” he recalls. “Next time they saw sunlight, they were suffocated together in a bucket on a conveyor belt. Before they could figure out what was happening to them, a sharp knife pierced through their gills, and their blood floated underneath my boots.”
Leung says he saw millions of fish die this way, and could never find a way to reconcile his love for animals and seafood. Then, he joined the alt-protein industry and worked in fundraising. But he struggled with the way startups were run and said he was ousted from one of his roles for questioning the status quo. “I still had a mission, and the mission was not completed. I chose to give up everything and start from scratch. I recycled capital by helping investors exit. I visited many labs around the world and recruited a scientific team with veterinarian and fish cell culture experience.”
Courtesy: SeaAhead
What’s next
Leung says the startup is working on “caviar, roe and other seafood delicacies”, but didn’t elaborate on the latter when pressed. As for the production and final costs, he said: “Price point for cultivated meat will [be] higher in the mid-term future. Scaling commoditised products to reach cost parity will be costly for investors.”
He adds that the product will be priced at a premium, given the category: “From my career experience, novel products entering the seafood market were first sold at a higher price point. We plan to make cultivated caviar desirable and sell it at a premium to discerning customers.”
It’s early days for Marinas Bio and the company has plenty to prove. As Leung wrote in a social media post: “We still have a lot of work to do, but we have wisdom from our previous experience.” The team is committed, and ocean conservation is top of mind: “We share a mission to conserve life below water through cell cultivation. Together, the future of sustainable seafood is in our hands.”
The UK is set to fast-track its approval of cultivated meat as part of a bilateral agreement with Israel, according to the Telegraph. The news comes two months after Israel’s Aleph Farms became the first cultured meat company to file for regulatory approval in the UK.
Currently, the UK still retains its pre-Brexit rules and follows EU regulations when it comes to cultivated meat. In the EU, it’s regarded as a “novel food“, and companies thus need to gain premarket authorisation for the sale of their cultured meat products. In the UK, the body handling this matter is the Food Standards Agency (FSA).
In 2021, the FSA conducted a consumer poll to test acceptance of alternative proteins, and found that 78% of Brits had heard of cultivated meat, and a third would be willing to try it. Despite that, only three in 10 perceived it as safe to eat, and 42% said that nothing could encourage them to try cell-based meat. However, 27% said they could be persuaded if they knew it was safe to eat, and 23% if they knew it was properly regulated.
According to alt-protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI), the FSA then launched a review of the UK’s novel food regulation to “identify and evaluate a range of potential regulatory models for novel foods”. So while the EU model remains in place for now, GFI said “we may see a new system for evaluating cultivated meat products in the future”.
And we might just be soon. The Telegraph reports that UK ministers and regulators are looking to accelerate the approval of cultivated meat to boost food security, ease the cost of living, and provide alternative, planet-friendly meat sources for a growing population.
Taking inspiration from Israel’s cultivated meat sector
Courtesy: Aleph Farms
The newspaper says the UK is set to sign a deal with Israel to boost collaboration on cell-cultured meat. With more cultivated meat companies per capita than almost anywhere else, Israel is home to many pioneers in this space, including Believer Meats (formerly Future Meat), SuperMeat, BioBetter, and Aleph Farms. In 2021, it invested $18M in the world’s largest cultivated meat consortium, while government funding has contributed $13M to early-stage startups and infrastructure in this sector.
Some have predicted that Israel could be the next country to greenlight the regulatory approval for cultured meat. It’s against this backdrop that the nation is said to be at “the forefront of the movement”, as the Telegraph puts it. The UK’s FSA is now reportedly “considering future changes” to its regulatory process to cut red tape and “remove unnecessary burdens on business”.
“There are some good signs that in the DNA of homosapiens, there’s a need for meat and we are not going to be able to meet that through traditional husbandry with nine billion hungry mouths to feed by 2050,” said science minister George Freeman. “We’re going to have to generate novel sources.”
The cost-of-living crisis has hit the UK hard, with prices of some meat and vegetables almost doubling over the past year. “If we don’t quickly generate ways to develop very low-cost protein, we’re going to see huge geographical instability,” Freeman said.
Freeman and FSA officials visited Israel earlier this year to taste the cultivated meat and see how the market is regulated in the country. The deal between the two nations comes on the heels of another recent agreement to boost quantum research and academia links and allow Israeli businesses to submit new tech for regulatory approval in the UK.
The UK’s cell-cultured opportunity
Courtesy: Ivy Farm
In August, Aleph Farms became the first cultivated meat company to file for cultivated meat approval in the UK. It’s already in talks with commercial partners and plans to begin production in the country in the next few years, expecting the regulatory process to take “a couple of years” but calling the potential “huge”.
It signalled the opportunity for cultivated meat in the UK. GFI Europe reported that investment in the sector grew by 400% between 2021-22 – more than all of Europe combined – while separate research found that British companies received £28.55M in investment for cultured meat, behind only the US, Israel, Netherlands and Singapore. Moreover, research has found that the UK’s overall alt-protein sector could create 25,000 jobs by 2035.
Moreover, earlier this year, the UK government made its largest investment in alt-protein with a £12M grant for the creation of the Cellular Agriculture Manufacturing Hub. Similarly, the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council has set aside £20M towards sustainable protein development.
Additionally, according to the Telegraph, the UK is home to more than a third of all companies working on cell-cultured meat globally. Among them are Ivy Farm, which opened the UK’s largest cultivated meat facility in Oxford last year, and Extracellular, which is building what it claims will be “Europe’s largest” contract pilot plant for cultivated meat in Bristol (due to be operational by December).
James Cooper, deputy director of food policy at the FSA, told the Telegraph: “The FSA is committed to supporting business innovation in new markets by delivering effective and proportionate regulation to protect consumers. We are always keen to learn more from other countries about their approach to the regulation of emerging technologies and are developing relationships with international organisations to learn about their approach to cell-cultivated products.”
“Israel has very strong expertise in protein replacement and in agri-tech and turning deserts into a garden,” said Freeman. “It is possible for us to be a world producer of very high standard beef, poultry and pork, whilst also making sure that we’re able to produce very low-cost protein for hard-hit families that are struggling and can’t afford a £70 joint of beef. It’s not an ‘either or’.”
He added: “It’s making sure that we’re able to maintain our very high food quality standards and international reputation, reduce the cost of living, and help develop the technologies that the world needs.”
Sunak’s climate U-turn and calls for improved cultured meat regulation
Courtesy: Lydia Handford/UK Government
The news comes two weeks after UK prime minister Rishi Sunak U-turned on the country’s climate commitments and pushed back the deadline for gas and diesel car bans from 2030, garnering fierce criticism. Sunak said he remained committed to sticking to the UK’s net-zero goal for 2050, but wanted to be “more pragmatic, proportionate and realistic” in his approach. But he has not outlined how he would do so. In June, the UK’s Climate Change Committee said its pace of action to reduce emissions by 68% by 2030 from a 1990 benchmark is “worryingly slow”.
The Telegraph’s report follows analysis by GFI Europe in August, which found that the UK needs to invest £390M in alternative proteins between 2025 and 2030 to avoid losing momentum to other countries and reduce the risk of startups moving overseas due to regulatory uncertainties.
“As other countries, from the Netherlands to Singapore, invest heavily in sustainable proteins, and as many British startups look to the US following the landmark approval of cultivated meat, failing to act now could see the UK falling behind in this global challenge,” GFI Europe’s UK policy manager Linus Pardoe told Green Queen at the time.
An independent review by Deloitte in June found that the UK’s regulatory framework for novel foods needs refreshing. And the GFI Europe report said that the FSA should learn from best practices of more innovation-focused regulatory bodies, both domestically and overseas.
“Currently, the UK’s regulatory framework isn’t optimised to foster the growth of this new way of making sustainable food,” Pardoe added, “and our report recommends that regulators move urgently to introduce ‘quick win’ reforms to the novel foods framework to build confidence in the sector.”
Brazilian meat giant JBS has broken ground on a $62M cultivated meat research and development facility in Florianópolis, Santa Catarina. Billed as the largest food biotech centre in Brazil, it’s scheduled to open at the end of 2024. The world’s biggest meat company – and a highly controversial one at that – is aiming to produce cell-cultured beef in the future.
The JBS Biotech Innovation Centre will see the meat company invest funds in three phases, with the total required capital estimated to be $62M. It will invest $22M in the first stage, which will focus on the construction of lab facilities, and the second phase centred on a pilot plant. In the third stage, JBS will look to build an industrial-scale model to exhibit the technical and economic potential of cultivated proteins.
The new R&D hub will feature a scientific team of 25 specialist post-doctoral researchers, plus staff and clerical support. The project is designed to serve as a base for future facilities that JBS may work on to manufacture cultivated beef and other meat products. The aim is to make the production of cell-cultured meat more affordable, efficient and scalable.
Cultivated beef endorsed by a conventional meat giant
Courtesy: JBS
JBS first declared the project in 2021, when it earmarked about $100M for investment in the cultivated meat sector. Out of this, $41M was set aside to invest in Spanish cell-based meat startup BioTech Foods. Last year, the latter broke ground on what it claims is the world’s largest cultivated beef manufacturing facility in San Sebastián, which is slated to finish by mid-2024.
The plant will reportedly have a capacity to produce 1,000 tonnes of cultivated meat annually, with the potential to quadruple this output. JBS says that while the factory will focus on products like sausages, burgers and meatballs, BioTech Foods’ tech can expand beyond beef to include cell-cultured chicken, pork and fish.
“As a global leader in protein production, it is our responsibility to be at the forefront of food tech,” said JBS’s global supply and innovation director Jerson Nascimento Jr. “The JBS Biotech Innovation Centre reinforces our commitment to the cultivated protein sector, consolidates our position as one of the main players in this very promising market, and reinforces our commitment to offering innovative, high-quality products to our consumers.”
The new plant is being led by Luismar Marques Porto, its cultivated meat president, and Fernanda Vieira Berti, VP of the research facility. Scientists at the JBS Biotech Innovation Centre – which will be located at the Sapiens Parque innovation hub – have already begun working at temporary facilities to research beef cell cultivation.
“We are delighted to be part of the first initiative of this size in Brazil and to be able to contribute to studies that will help expand the sector. We are confident this project will become an international benchmark,” said Porto.
JBS isn’t the only meat giant that has invested in the cultivated protein sector. In 2018, Tyson Foods acquired a minor stake in cultivated meat leader Upside Foods (then called Memphis Meats) – which is one of the only two such companies that have received regulatory approval for sale in the US. Upside Foods also received investment from Cargill (in 2017 and 2020), which invested in Israeli startup Aleph Farms in 2019 as well.
JBS remains a problematic company on the climate front
Courtesy: JBS
When the world’s largest meat company – with assets worth nearly $40B – makes a move this big for alt-protein, it’s bound to attract interest. But despite the company’s purported support of slaughter-free animal meat production, JBS has a checkered record when it comes to ethical and environmental issues. In fact, JBS is under pressure from environmental groups that are urging the US Securities and Exchange Commission to block its IPO in the country, calling it the “biggest climate risk IPO listing in history”.
The company has a well-documented past of greenwashing and human rights abuses. While it may be making plans to produce cultivated meat, JBS increased its greenhouse gas emissions by 51% between 2016 and 2021 – additionally, its total emissions were actually 68 times higher than what it claimed. Moreover, JBS has been found to be among the biggest drivers of Amazon deforestation, with the number of slaughterhouses in the region more than doubling between 2009 and 2020.
Meanwhile, earlier this year, JBS was accused of child labour abuses, with two dozen minors allegedly hired by a cleaning company to clean JBS’s dangerous meatpacking plants across the US. And in World Animal Protection’s list of the meat industry’s climate impact, the company ranks as the worst offender globally.
JBS’s integrity was called into question in an exposé ahead of COP26 in 2021, with multiple breaches found just six months after its publication. This included settling with the US Department of Justice over a price-fixing scheme in beef markets, gaining approval or agreeing to settle over poultry and pork price fixing, respectively, and being fined over a fatality at one of its facilities.
In a statement, Rainforest Action Network lists the practices JBS has been accused of over the last 15 years: “Illegality; deforestation; invasion and land grabbing of Indigenous and traditional territories; land conflicts and violence against rights defenders, slavery and labour abuses in its supply chain; lack of traceability; corruption; and greenwashing.”
Cultivated meat facilities around the world
Courtesy: Amit Goren
There are several large-scale cultivated meat facilities by alt-protein startups that are already operational or mid-construction. These differ from pilot plants, which are pre-commercial manufacturing systems to test the technology in small volumes. Shanghai-based CellX, for example, completed the construction of what it called a “large-scale pilot plant” last month.
In February last year, Aleph Farms moved to a 65,000 sq ft plant in Rehovot, Israel, which increased its capacity by six times to be able to initially produce 10 tonnes of cultivated steak annually. And earlier this year, it announced the acquisition of another manufacturing facility in Modi’in, Israel.
In December 2022, fellow Israeli producer Believer Meats (formerly Future Meat) broke ground on a 200,000 sq ft facility – which it says will be the largest cultured meat factory in the world when it opens. It is said to have a capacity of at least 10,000 metric tons of cell-based meat, which is more than double the potential output of the JBS-BioTech Foods plant.
In May, Mosa Meat – which showcased the world’s first cultivated beef burger 10 years ago – unveiled what it claimed is currently the world’s largest cultivated meat production plant in Maastricht, Netherlands. This is the company’s fourth facility, expanding its footprint to 7,340 sq m (79,007 sq ft). Mosa Meat says its “cultivated meat campus”, which has a 1000-litre bioreactor scale, can produce “tens of thousands of cultivated hamburgers”.
Earlier this month, Upside Foods began construction of a 187,000 sq ft factory in Glenview, Illinois, which can eventually produce 30 million pounds of meat and seafood annually. This follows its Engineering, Production and Innovation Center (EPIC) plant, which can currently produce 50,000 lbs of finished cultured meat products annually, with the potential to expand to 400,000 lbs though a recent Wired investigation raised questions about whether the company was producing its products in the facility’s bioreactors.
Meanwhile, Eat Just’s Good Meat – the other company to earn regulatory approval in the US, and the first to do so globally in Singapore back in 2020 – is building what it says is Asia’s largest cultured meat plant in Singapore. It also signed an agreement for a US facility that will house 10 250,000-litre bioreactors, which it says will be capable of producing 30 million lbs of meat.
Over in Asia, Malaysian company Cell AgriTech is preparing to open the country’s first cultivated meat facility in Q4 2024, while South Korean cultured beef producer Seawith announced a ₩6.5B ($5.43M) investment last year, which it plans to use for a state-of-the-art production plant.
Shanghai-based agtech firm CellX has announced the successful trial of its first 200-litre fish cell pilot production, marking an important step towards its industrial application of cultivated seafood products. It comes a month after the completion of its large-scale cultivated meat pilot factory last month.
CellX’s research and development team completed the first production trial of suspended cultured fish cells in a 200-litre bioreactor, achieving what the company calls a “smooth transition” of the first batch of cells from its lab to its pilot workshop.
Last month, the company completed Future Food Factory X, its new pilot plant that features multiple 1,000-litre bioreactors and has been called the “cornerstone” of CellX’s journey to scale production. The company had already screened 20 immortalised cell lines via a high-throughput automated system, and some had already been adapted to grow in single-cell suspension. This included what CellX claimed was the world’s first successful single-cell suspension of fish cell lines.
The same month, CellX says it trialled avian cells in a 1,000-litre system, demonstrating its vision of “building a technology platform and promoting multiple pipelines simultaneously”. In the first batch of fish cells, the maximum cell growth density was nearly 20 million cells per ml, with a higher potential for growth rate and efficiency compared to avian and mammarian cells.
Overcoming cost and other challenges
Courtesy: CellX
The company claims the cost of producing this batch was lower than 400 yuan per unit (below $55) and under $100 per pound, while industrial-scale manufacturing will bring it down further. And this is essential, given that cultivated meat production would need to reach $2.92 per pound to be price-competitive, according to Reuters. “We are confident that through continuous technological iteration, we can achieve cost-effective mass production of cultivated fish,” said Shuangshuang Chen, CellX’s head of research and development.
CellX has previously stated its intention to target the high-end market first and says scaling up combined with a much lower cost of bioreactors (compared to the US and Europe) and the Chinese government’s incentives for cultivated meat as part of its 14th five-year plan, will help lower costs.
The successful trial is a breakthrough given research on fish cell suspension culture has faced many challenges in the past, according to the company. When compared to poultry and livestock, fish cells lack basic industry and academic research on suspension culture, so CellX needed to explore suitable suspension paths from scratch. There is also a lack of corresponding suspension culture media for fish cells, with few reference points, which makes it harder to develop corresponding media.
CellX says its high-mobility technology platform – a result of three years of R&D – can be applied to different product pipelines. “Through the use of high-throughput equipment and systematic research methods for cell fate regulation, we achieved successful suspension differentiation of fish cells in only six months, which typically requires one to two years in the industry,” said Chen.
The company believes this trial has laid down the marker for the commercial production of cultivated fish. “We expect this technology to play an important role in ensuring food security and promoting sustainable fisheries development,” Chen added.
The rise of cultivated seafood
Courtesy: BlueNalu
“As global attention continues to focus on food security, carbon neutrality and other issues – as well as growing concerns about marine pollution and overfishing – efficient, controlled, and safe cultivated aquatic products hold tremendous market potential,” said CellX co-founder and CEO Ziliang Yang.
Rising demand for seafood has led to higher greenhouse gas emissions, and the heavy fuel use by ocean fishery vessels also contributes to climate change. The use of plastic packaging and the presence of microplastics in the ocean exacerbate the industry’s problems – both of which are highlighted in the 2021 documentary Seaspiracy.
“Through platform technology support, we are actively developing a series of high-value aquatic products, including grouper and yellow croaker, providing strong technical support for future high-value seafood products entering the market,” said Yang.
Currently, only Singapore and the US allow the sale of cultivated meat, and Yang said last month that CellX will file for regulatory approval in both countries, with the aim to launch in 2025.
Three months after becoming the joint-first company to gain regulatory approval for cultivated meat in the US, California-based Upside Foods has announced a new commercial-scale manufacturing plant near Chicago. The new facility will begin producing ground cell-cultured chicken products, with an initial capacity of millions of pounds per year.
The 187,000 sq ft is based in Glenview, Illinois, and is titled Rubicon “with an appreciation for its historical significance as a point of no return”. In what is a significant step in the mainstreaming of cell-cultured meat, the factory has the potential to eventually produce 30 million pounds of cultivated meat and seafood products per year, and house cultivators with capacities of up to 100,000 litres.
Upside Foods COO Amy Chen told Green Queen that the facility – one of the world’s largest and most advanced commercial sites of its kind – will start with a broad portfolio of chicken-based formulations, including products like chicken nuggets, chicken sausages, dumplings and patties.
Second cultivated meat facility enables mass production
Upside Foods’ new large-scale production plant leverages the geographical, labour and innovation advantages of Chicago | Courtesy: Upside Foods
The company’s current cultivated chicken, which entered US foodservice via Bar Crenn in August, is manufactured at its Engineering, Production and Innovation Center (EPIC) in Emeryville, California. That plant can currently produce 50,000 pounds of finished cultured meat products annually, with the potential for future expansion to accommodate over 400,000 pounds per year.
“Not only does [EPIC] serve as the pioneering facility for the production and sale of our commercial products, but it also functions as an innovation centre for research and development that guides our scaling efforts,” said Chen.
“On the other hand, our Chicago facility marks our inaugural venture into large-scale commercial production,” she added. “Leveraging the knowledge accumulated from Upside’s EPIC facility in California, this new establishment will propel us to the next level of cultivated meat production.”
The company selected Dallas-based tech firm Jacobs as its design and manufacturing partner for the new plant, and chose the Chicago metropolitan area as its mass-manufacturing base due to the region’s legacy in meat production, a shared commitment to innovation and sustainability, strategic geographical advantages (it’s located at a major transportation crossroads), and its talented workforce.
It comes after the January acquisition of Wisconsin-based cultivated seafood producer Cultured Decadence. Upside Foods, which is worth $1B and has brought in $600M in funding, said this furthers its “commitment to the Midwest”, where it plans a total investment of over $140M. The company claimed this will create 75 new jobs – from warehousing and logistics positions to bioprocessing and food production – as well as other commercial functions.
“This new facility is a significant investment in our communities – creating new good-paying jobs while advancing our ambitious clean energy goals to create a more sustainable future,” Illinois governor JB Pritzker said in a statement. Touching upon Upside Foods’ US regulatory approval, he added: “Their pioneering leadership makes them a perfect fit for the region.”
“We’re excited that the next chapter of our journey towards building a more sustainable, humane, and abundant future will be in Illinois,” said Upside Foods founder and CEO Uma Valeti. “We are grateful for the collaboration and partnership that we have built at the state, county, and local levels in our site selection process.”
Diversifying the product range and bringing costs down
Upside Foods’ EPIC cultivated meat plant in Emeryville, California | Courtesy: Upside Foods
Upside Foods said that while ground chicken is its initial focus, it plans to diversify into other animal-based foods and whole-textured formats in the future. Chen declined to share specifics about the production and market costs of the cultivated chicken but confirmed it would enter the market at a premium. “Our ultimate goal is to reach price parity and eventually be more affordable than conventionally produced meat,” she added.
“That broad journey of technical scale-up, buildout of the supply chain ecosystem, and continuing to move down the cost curve is something we are laser-focused on in our next chapter. For instance, further reducing the cost of cell feed and finding efficiencies in bioprocess scale-up will play key roles in achieving our scale-up goals. We’ve already made tremendous progress on both of these fronts, and continue to invest in developing and testing new production processes to help achieve these goals.”
In 2021, Upside Foods announced a breakthrough development, producing an animal-component-free (ACF) cell feed for its cultivated chicken products. This meant it was no longer using the controversial fetal bovine serum (FBS), and doubtless helped fast-track scalable production as well as earn regulatory clearance. Chen remained coy on whether the company was planning on applying for approval in other countries – Singapore is the only other country that allows the sale of cultivated meat so far – but hinted that “our mission is global”.
She added that following its collaboration with Bar Crenn, the company planned on partnering with additional chefs and restaurants in the US, and eventually selling its products in grocery stores and markets globally: “Ultimately, we want Upside’s products to be available everywhere meat is sold, including retail and foodservice channels.”
A recent consumer poll by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that half of Americans are unlikely to try cell-cultured meat, with most citing the reason as “it just sounds weird”, half saying they don’t think it would be safe.
Chen, however, remains confident about the consumer appeal of cultured meat. “We’re focused on educating consumers on what cultivated meat is and the potential benefits it can provide,” she said. “We believe they will fall in love with the familiar taste and texture of cultivated meat now that they have the chance to experience it.”
Launched last week, the Plenty Foundation is a new non-profit aiming to address the challenges in Africa’s food system through biotech solutions and key multisector partnerships. Speaking to Green Queen, its founder Arturo Jose Garcia explains how the organisation hopes to boost the continent’s food and nutrition security, and the role alternative proteins can play in creating a sustainable food system.
A fifth of Africa’s population – that’s 278 million people – is undernourished, and 55 million children under the age of five are stunted due to severe malnutrition, according to Oxfam. The Global Network Against Food Crises has found that at least one in five Africans goes to bed hungry, with an estimated 140 million people in Africa facing acute food insecurity.
This is the backdrop the Plenty Foundation is launching in, hoping to reduce undernourishment rates, produce successful R&D outcomes, and increase the adoption of biotech solutions to uplift Africa’s food system. The organisation will combine philanthropy, commercial R&D and market partnerships, blending modern tech with local understanding to enhance and accelerate the development and availability of sustainable food options.
How cultivated meat can help Africa’s food system
Chief among these are alternative proteins like plant-based and cultivated meat products, which will play “a crucial role in transforming Africa’s food systems”, according to Plenty Foundation founder Arturo Jose Garcia. “Cultivated meat offers an efficient and sustainable means to provide high-quality protein without the significant land, water and feed resources required for traditional livestock farming,” he tells Green Queen.
“For regions of Africa facing scarcity, cultivated meat presents an innovative solution to meet the protein needs of the population without exacerbating resource constraints.” Africa’s population is expected to grow from 1.3 billion to 2.5 billion by 2050 (meaning a quarter of the global population would be African) – and the demand for meat is expected to skyrocket with it.
Courtesy: Newform Foods
While the organisation promotes plant-based diets for their sustainability and health credentials, it recognises the “cultural and nutritional importance of meat in many African diets”. This is why it advocates for cultivated meat as a complementary solution, “providing the sensory and nutritional benefits of meat without the environmental drawbacks”.
Jose Garcia adds that different regions of Africa have unique challenges, and each needs tailored solutions. “In some parts of Africa, introducing more animal protein can be beneficial, especially in areas where malnutrition is prevalent,” he says.
“Sub-Saharan Africa faces acute challenges like malnutrition, droughts and limited agricultural infrastructure. Cultivated meat can address malnutrition by providing essential proteins. In Western Africa, where livestock farming is prominent, transitioning to cultivated meat can reduce overgrazing and desertification.”
Partnering with Newform Foods and NGOs
The foundation is enlisting the help of its commercial partner, Newform Foods (formerly Mzansi Meat), Africa’s first cultivated meat company. “We’re embarking on an innovative project: combining cultivated fat with existing alternative protein products,” notes Jose Garcia. “This approach retains the sensory and nutritional richness of meat while drastically reducing the environmental footprint.”
He adds: “Essentially, we’re bridging the best of both worlds – offering the taste and nutritional profile of meat and the eco-friendliness of plant-based sources. Our goal is to provide a holistic solution that caters to cultural preferences, health needs, and the planet’s wellbeing.”
The non-profit says its success wouldn’t just be measured in terms of the number of meals provided, but also in the quality of those meals and the long-term sustainability of the solutions implemented. Its partnership with Newform Foods combines cutting-edge tech with a deep understanding of local needs to offer sustainable and nutritionally rich food options. “We believe that such entrepreneurial initiatives, backed by venture capital and strategic partnerships, can catalyse significant positive changes in Africa’s food systems.”
Courtesy: Plenty Foundation/LinkedIn
The Plenty Foundation has also submitted an application to ProVeg International’s Kickstarting for Good incubator programme, which supports non-profits, impact initiatives and social startups transforming the food system. “While our central commitment is to our collaboration with Newform Foods, we are excited about the potential to collaborate with organizations like ProVeg, especially given their recent expansion into Africa.”
Additionally, the organisation plans to team up with local NGOs on the distribution and acceptance of cell-cultured meat to ensure its solutions are “grounded in local realities”. “Partnering with such entities can significantly enhance our efforts, promoting cultivated meat as a viable, sustainable, and nutritious solution for the African continent,” explains Jose Garcia.
The future is exciting
He’s optimistic about the future of the region’s food system. And why wouldn’t he be? When it comes to cell-cultured meat, consumer reaction is encouraging. An October 2021 poll found that 60% of South Africans are ‘highly interested’ in trying cultivated meat, while a further 53% said they were ‘highly likely’ to purchase products made this way. In fact, 31% said they were open to paying more for cell-cultured meat. Brands like Newform Foods and WildBio (formerly Mogale Meat, which unveiled Africa’s first cultivated chicken) are pioneers in this space, but won’t be the last ones.
“Having witnessed the challenges of industrialised animal agriculture firsthand, the innovations emerging from Africa’s food sector fill me with hope,” Jose Garcia says. “Trailblazers like Essential and De Novo Dairy are redefining food production with their unique approaches. West Africa boasts companies like Veggie Victory and Baby Refill, leveraging indigenous crops for plant-based products.
“Meanwhile, East Africa, with initiatives such as Kelp Blue, explores the vast potential of algae and seaweed as protein sources. With support from entities like Co-Creation Hub and Vegan Africa Fund, Africa is solidifying its position in the global alternative protein scene.”
Cultivated meat can be considered halal if it meets certain criteria, according to three Shariah scholars who advised alt-protein leader Just Eat on the matter. The company, whose subsidiary GOOD Meat became the world’s first cultured meat producer to get regulatory approval in 2020, says it will work along these guidelines to make its cell-based chicken halal-certified.
Halal diets refer to the consumption of food in accordance with Islamic law. In terms of meat, this means animals must be slaughtered in a prescribed way, and certain types of meat and byproducts – including pork and blood products – are prohibited.
Making cultivated meat halal-certified could be a giant step toward the widespread acceptance and adoption of these foods. Halal consumers represent 25% of the world’s population, and the Halal meat market is estimated to grow by 7% annually to reach $375B in 2031. Additionally, research has found that Muslims want to see Halal certification – particularly from their own country’s authorities – to be confident in consuming alt-meat products.
Criteria to make cultivated meat halal-certified
Credit: Eat Just
The Shariah opinion comes from Sheikh Abdullah AlManea, Professor Abdullah al-Mutlaq and Professor Saad Al-Shathry – three widely respected scholars from Saudi Arabia. They reviewed documents prepared by GOOD Meat and attorneys describing how its cultivated chicken is produced, detailing how the cells are sourced and selected, the ingredients fed to the cells to stimulate growth, how the cells are harvested, and how finished products are manufactured.
The scholars concluded that cultivated meat, in general, can be halal if it meets the following criteria:
The cell line is from an animal that’s permissible to eat, like a chicken or cow.
The animal the cell line is extracted from is slaughtered according to Islamic law.
The nutrients fed to the cells are permissible to eat, and don’t include any forbidden substances like spilled blood, alcohol or materials extracted from improperly slaughtered animals, or pigs.
The cultivated meat is edible and does not harm human health, and this is confirmed by specialists, like a country’s food regulatory agency.
Eat Just confirmed to Green Queen that this means cultivated pork still won’t be considered halal, as the Quran prohibits the consumption of meat derived from pigs in Islamic culture. It also means that cultivated meat made from the controversial fetal bovine serum (FBS), which breaches Halal guidance as it’s derived from the blood of unborn calves, cannot be considered halal.
GOOD Meat’s chicken cell line and production process – which have been approved in Singapore and the US – don’t currently meet the halal criteria laid out by the Shariah scholars. Its cultivated chicken isn’t FBS-free yet, but in January, it received the world’s first regulatory approval for serum-free media in Singapore.
The company confirmed that it’s now working on an amendment to its FDA approval for the same, adding that GOOD Meat’s R&D operations have been “free from animal-derived nutrients for over three years”. It will now take these guidelines into consideration to meet halal guidelines for its cell-culture products.
The importance of halal for cultivated meat
Courtesy: Eat Just
A poll commissioned by GOOD Meat last year found that a vast majority of consumers in six Middle Eastern countries – areas with large Muslim populations – would buy cultivated meat and transition from conventional counterparts, as long as it was halal, cost-competitive, and tasted the same as traditional meat.
“If cultivated meat is to help address our future food system needs, it has to be an option for the billions of people around the world who eat halal,” said GOOD Meat co-founder and CEO Josh Tetrick. “This landmark ruling provides much-needed clarity on how to ensure that is achieved. All companies should work to build a process to meet these guidelines.”
In a study published in July, Professor Cother Hajat and Dr Sophie Attwood wrote: “Muslim consumers recognise additional potential benefits of cultivated meat for the Halal economy, both in terms creating new jobs for halal meat scientists, as well as helping to grow Muslim-owned food businesses. Greater adoption of cultivated meat may also be viewed by some Islamic jurists and Halal consumers as a step toward Khilafa (guardianship of nature) [Quran 10:14], which is an important principle related to environmental sustainability.”
“More than a billion people around the world adhere to halal food standards, so for cultivated meat to make the leap from novelty to the norm, it is crucial that there are viable pathways to achieve this certification,” said Mirte Gosker, managing director of alt-protein think tank the Good Food Institute APAC. “Building a truly inclusive, efficient and secure protein production system requires making high-quality, nutrient-rich and culturally relevant foods available to every facet of society.”
Canadian cultivated meat startup The Better Butchers has revealed plans to open what would be the world’s first exclusively cultured meat butchery within the next two years. The brand says it wants to be Canada’s first company to launch cultivated meat to market, and has had “positive discussions” with regulatory authorities in the country.
The startup is founded by Mitchell Scott, who was the former co-founder of US plant-based meat brand The Very Good Food Company. Scott was terminated as company CEO in 2022, and the business itself went into receivership this year.
“When I was unceremoniously exited from the plant-based food company I co-founded, I started looking into it and ended up building out a team to start the world’s first cultivated butchery,” Scott told Vegconomist. “In addition to having the potential to solve massive environmental, ethical and health concerns, I think cultivated meat can also solve some of the consumer adoption issues facing plant-based meat, such as taste, texture, and long ingredient lists.”
The Better Butchers plans to open its cultivated meat butchery in Vancouver in 2024, and is currently also focusing on a direct-to-consumer product portfolio, with plans to enter foodservice and wholesale in the aftermath. The brand is working on prototypes of cultivated pork sausages, meatballs and marinated steaks.
Canada’s regulatory process
Courtesy: The Better Butchers
Scott said the company has had positive discussions with regulators for a potential approval of The Better Butchers’ cultivated meat products. He expects just over a 12-month process to get the regulatory seal, once the prototypes are complete in Q1 2024.
According to industry think tank the Good Food Institute, Canada has stated its intent to regulate cultivated meat under its current novel foods regulations, instead of considering new regulatory approaches. Authorisation requires a premarket proposal with detailed information about the product. And the approval process is made up of three parts: a ‘letter of no objection’ for human food use; a premarket assessment for new animal feed, regardless of whether the product is intended for that purpose; and an environmental assessment.
Canada’s regulator, Health Canada, is also working in tandem with Food Standards Australia New Zealand on applications of GMO food safety assessment components. The collaboration will see one body take the lead while the other peer reviews, which streamlines the regulatory process, saves costs for both applicants and agencies, and maintains regulators’ independence for final approval.
Meanwhile, since the US is already further up the regulatory ladder after becoming only the second country to approve the sale of cell-cultured meat this June, The Better Butchers plans to pursue approval in that market too.
Cultivated meat in Canada
Courtesy: The Better Butchers
Interest in cultivated meat in Canada is booming. A new report published last week by the Canadian Food Innovation Network (CFIN) and Fiddlehead Technologies found that there have been 22 patent filings for cell-based meat tech in the country since 2020, with nine companies working in the nation’s cultivated meat sector. Meanwhile, media coverage about the topic has been more positive in recent years. And Canadians increasingly searched for terms including ‘lab-grown meat’, from its production process to its availability for sale.
GFI also notes that last year, Canada invested in cultivated meat development and commercialisation through the government-funded non-profit Ontario Genomics. It collaborated with Germany’s The Cultivated B. to build a 130,000 sq ft cellular agriculture facility, which will provide a domestic supply of bioreactors. Ontario Genomics also partnered with the CFIN for AcCELLerate-ON, a CAD$900,000 competition for cultivated food and beverage projects. Three of the winners of last year’s contest focused on cultivated meat and seafood.
While The Better Butchers wants to be the first company to bring cultivated meat to Canada’s market, a host of other businesses are working on cell-cultured meat and seafood in the country. And last year, Canada saw the opening of a new Institute of Cellular Agriculture, born out of a strategic partnership between leading cultivated protein investor Cult Food Science, the University of Alberta, and New Harvest Canada.
As for butcheries, while The Better Butchers could very well be the first brand to open a butchery exclusively featuring cultivated meat, it won’t be the first butchery to offer cultivated meat. That honour rests with Singapore-based Huber’s Butchery, which put cultivated meat by GOOD Meat (the first company to receive regulatory approval for cultivated meat, also in Singapore) on its display and menu last December.
North Carolina-based biotech startup Jellatech has announced a $3.5M oversubscribed seed funding round to amp up the production of its cell-based collagen and other proteins. It comes months after the firm created a fully functional human collagen, which added to its portfolio of bovine and porcine collagen.
The fundraising round was led by Nordic VC firm byFounders, with other investors including Milano Investment Partners, Joyful VC, Siddhi Capital and Blustein. Jellatech says it will use the capital to scale up production, establish partnerships, and commercialise its animal-free proteins for use in healthcare, personal care, biomedical research, and food and beverage.
When Jellatech was founded in 2020, its focus was on creating cell-based collagen and gelatin – two animal proteins widely used across a number of industries. It has made multiple strides in the former department, unveiling a full-length, triple-helical collagen created with its proprietary cell line last year, which functions identically to conventional sources.
In March, it unveiled its cell-based human collagen, which is typically used in biomedical and clinical applications, including tissue engineering, arthritis treatment, regenerative medicine, 3D bioprinting, and dermal fillers. The company says it is developing more proteins as part of its portfolio.
Tackling collagen-driven deforestation
Jellatech has created human collagen from cells | Courtesy: Jellatech
“Jellatech’s technology unlocks a fundamentally new branch of the tech tree of our species: creating complex proteins from scratch, at scale, without having to ‘mine’ animal bodies,” said Magnus Hambleton, an investor at byFounders. “Jellatech sustainably and ethically produces large, complex proteins at scale starting with collagen. The impact that this can have is going to be enormous.”
Collagen – which is the most abundant protein in animals and is typically found in cattle, pigs and fish – has a detrimental impact on the environment. An investigation this year found that tens of thousands of cattle raised for collagen production are on farms linked to deforestation in the Amazon – an ongoing crisis contributing to climate change and biodiversity loss. According to one estimate, tropical deforestation is the cause of 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The industry has also been linked to violence against Indigenous populations in Brazilian forests.
“Instead of isolating and purifying collagen and gelatin from animals we grow it – using cells in a bioreactor. We don’t require acres of land, live animals, shipping, slaughtering and various complicated processes to produce collagen,” Jellatech co-founder and CEO Stephanie Michelsen has previously said. “With our proprietary method we design, grow and purify collagen and gelatin, all in the same place.”
Collagen’s health effects
Courtesy: Jellatech
Jellatech taps into a sector with rapid growth potential – the global collagen market was valued at $9.12B in 2022, and is expected to grow annually by 10.2% until 2030. Despite this demand, however, the benefits of collagen are subject to major debate. While some claim it can improve hair, skin, nails and joints – this slowing the process of ageing – the Harvard School of Public Health cautions consumers over study findings as most, “if not all”, of the research has been funded by industry members or scientists affiliated with stakeholder brands.
However, some research has pointed to the benefits of consuming collagen-building foods, rather than consuming collagen itself. Foods rich in vitamin C, zinc, copper, silicon, and the amino acids lysine and proline, have been linked to healthy collagen production.
Jellatech isn’t the only company making animal-free collagen. French biodesign startup Geltor has developed a fermentation-based vegan collagen. Meanwhile, Israeli cultured meat company Aleph Farms (which became the first startup to file for regulatory approval of cultivated meat in Europe in July) added cell-based collagen to its product portfolio in March. It expects to launch the alt-protein commercially next year.
Los Angeles startup Omeat, which launched in June after four years in stealth mode, has launched and already completed the first commercial sales of Plenty, its ethical and affordable alternative to fetal bovine serum (FBS). The product is available to buy for cultivated meat companies, presenting a slaughter-free substitute for the controversial growth medium and signals the launch of Omeat’s B2B arm.
Omeat claims it’s among the first revenue-generating cultivated meat companies, having created a cell culture supplement that can dramatically cut costs and be scaled up to meet the global demand for cultivated protein – a market that could reach $25B by 2030 if consumer acceptance grows. A 2021 poll conducted by Israeli cultured meat producer Aleph Farms showed that 87-89% of Gen Zers, 84-85% of millennials, 76-77% of Gen Xers, and 70-74% of boomers were at least somewhat open to trying cultivated meat.
The problem with FBS
Courtesy: Omeat
FBS originally paved the way for cultivated meat production, but it’s a problematic substance. Harvesting it entails taking cells from the fetuses of pregnant cows during their mutual slaughter. The resulting meat is thus not animal-free, and this has raised a lot of ethical concerns, particularly amongst animal activists.
Moreover, it’s an exorbitantly expensive process. When Dutch cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat introduced the first cell-based burger 10 years ago, it cost $300,000 for two beef patties. While tech advancements have naturally helped such processes scale up and cut costs, removing FBS played a major role in that.
Now, industry think tank the Good Food Institute predicts that cultivated meat could reach price parity with its traditional counterparts by as early as 2030, with further analysis by industry supplier Ark Biotech highlighting how cost-competitive cultivated meat could become a reality.
In 2019, Mosa Meat itself became the first company to ditch the serum, and in a remarkable move, published the formulation for developing serum-free growth media for cultivated meat last year. Now, more and more companies are looking to move away from FBS, and Omeat says Plenty is a humane, affordable, scalable, and highly effective option for cell culture growth.
Japanese startup IntegriCulture also developed cultivated chicken and duck liver cells using a serum-free medium, and South Korea’s CellMEAT created a serum-free cell culture medium to drive down production costs and provide an ethical cell-cultured meat option. But Omeat claims other FBS alternatives on the market fall short of efficacy and consistency when compared to Plenty.
The Plenty difference
Plenty is created using regenerative plasma drawn humanely from cows that graze freely on Omeat’s carbon-negative farm. Collected weekly, the process to extract the plasma is similar to human plasma donation. Unlike blood, plasma regenerates quickly, so the cows do not feel depleted.
“With one cow providing plasma weekly, we can create many cows’ worth of meat annually,” explained Omeat founder and CEO Ali Khademhosseini during its June debut. The company can produce 20 times more meat per cow than if it was slaughtered. “This means we can feed the planet with only a fraction of the current number of animals used in beef production.”
“We’re perfecting a sustainable operation that existing farms and ranches can implement, generating the same volume of product but with a fraction of the overhead,” said Khademhosseini. “It’s way more efficient, and we don’t have to sacrifice the cow.”
While Plenty does not require animal slaughter, it does still necessitate cows and this could be an ethically grey area, given that for most animal welfare activists, the goal is to remove animals (and the use of animals) from food production entirely.
Omeat, which raised $40M in an oversubscribed Series A round last year, sees itself as a meat company, with the goal to “be a bridge to the future of the meat industry”. It employs full-time veterinary and animal welfare staff, and has developed procedures for plasma collection that rely on positive reinforcement and prioritise the comfort and overall well-being of the cows.
A bridge to the meat industry’s future
Courtesy: Omeat
A cultivated meat company with a focus on generating revenues
Crucially, Plenty does not require FDA or USDA approval as it is not a food, allowing Omeat to start generating revenue right out of the gate. Other cultivated meat companies can now buy the serum for their own usage in a US market that is buzzing of late, thanks to historic regulatory milestones made in June this year- it is now only the second country to grant regulatory approval for the sale of cell-cultured meat. Singapore was the first to do so in 2020. Elsewhere, Israel’s Aleph Farms became the first company to file for approval in Europe in, with applications in Switzerland (though notably, not in Brussels) and the UK this July.
Plenty is not limited to the cultivated meat industry. Omeat says its solution will appeal to businesses focused on regenerative medicine and vaccine production, or employing cell-culture technology. “We’re looking forward to scaling and helping other companies that are changing the world, allowing them to achieve their goals with a product they can feel good about using,” says Khademhosseini in a statement.
“When it comes to growth media supplementation, FBS is considered the gold standard. However, FBS has downsides, including high costs, limited and unpredictable supply, and ethical concerns about the FBS harvesting process,” he adds.
“Synthetic serum substitutes, defined media, and serum-free media have been developed before as alternatives, but they’ve come with limitations that have hindered their viability as a replacement to FBS. That’s why we developed Plenty: an affordable, effective, and slaughter-free cell culture supplement product.”
While cultivated meat startups such as GOOD Meat and Upside Foods have completed initial consumer sales of their cultivated chicken products, with the former doing so since December 2020 in Singapore, these have been fairly limited in quantity due to production capacity constraints. Plenty could enable Omeat to be one of the first companies in the space to reach significant revenues within a fairly short time horizon.
While it’s a rapidly growing industry, cultivated meat is still a new concept to people, with regulators in only two countries across the world approving its sale so far. A new study has analysed the impact of food technology neophobia – a fear of the new – and different images on consumer attitudes towards cultivated meat.
The research found that food technology neophobia strongly impacts consumer acceptance of cultured meat. It has negative effects on their behavioural intentions – but even then, participants indicated they are likely to embrace cultivated meat. Those who had higher levels of neophobia were less likely to regularly buy and eat it, but for people with a higher level of acceptance, neophobia wasn’t as significant in their potential to consume cultivated meat as it is in their behavioural intentions.
Published in the Food Quality and Practice journal, the study surveyed 727 potential cultivated meat customers in Germany, examining their willingness to try cultured meat, regularly purchase it, eat it instead of conventional meat, and pay more for it. It combined information about these alternatives with images centring on the tech surrounding them (like in a lab setting), those that focused on them in a more familiar context (where they look like conventional meat), as well as without any photos.
Receiving detailed information about the benefits of cultured meat or including pictures alongside this information proved to have no significant influence on people’s intentions to consume or regularly buy cell-based alternatives. Participants’ attitudes similarly did not change based on whether the information focused on the benefits of cultivated meat or remained neutral.
People were also tested on their preference for deliberative or intuitive thinking. The study found that those who favoured intuitive thinking are more likely to accept cultivated meat, while those preferring deliberative thinking are more likely to reject it.
Additionally, the researchers found that frequent meat eaters and those who regularly eat meat substitutes like tofu are the two groups most likely to eat cultivated alternatives, showcasing enthusiasm for the relatively new tech. The study also proposed further analysis of the effect of information about the risks of cultivated meat on consumer perceptions.
Courtesy: Ivy Farm Technologies
Research important to highlight consumer acceptance of cultured meat
The analysis adds to a body of research exploring consumer perceptions about cell-cultured meat. One study conducted last year found a correlation between people’s wellbeing and willingness to try cultivated meat in Singapore, while earlier research in the country showed 78% of its residents are willing to try it.
According to industry think tank the Good Food Institute, total investment in cultivated meat startups reached $2.78B last year, with more than 150 companies working in this sector and governments across the globe pouring funds into cell-based meat research. This is a marker of increased acceptance, and one study has highlighted consumer belief that cultured protein will make up 40% of their meat intake in the future. This is in line with industry sentiment, too, as 86% of chefs say they want to serve cultivated meat to their customers.
As more countries look to approve the sale of cultivated meat – and as it becomes more widely available – studies like these provide a key insight into what consumers think and want, and how they’ll perceive such alt-proteins.
On August 5, 2013, a team of Dutch scientists from Maastricht University, led by Dr Mark Post, showcased the world’s first burger made from cultivated meat at a tasting in London. It was the result of decades of research and trials, with food critics describing this first prototype “close to meat, but not that juicy”, and Post calling it a “good start”.
Now, 10 years on, the progress made by this industry has accelerated, with more companies and funding than ever before, as well as increased government and regulatory support, and steps towards price parity with conventional meat. Here are 10 highlights defining the meteoric rise of cultivated meat.
Launch of the world’s first cultured meat hamburger (August 5, 2013)
1) There are now over 150 companies working on cultivated meat around the world
According to industry think tank the Good Food Institute’s 2023 State of the Industry Report, the total number of cultivated meat companies is at least 156 – up from 107 in 2021. These producers are based in 26 different regions internationally, and at least 70 additional brands have joined the industry via partnerships or product and service offerings.
This total number of companies, however, is likely an underestimate, as it’s common practice for startups to begin in ‘stealth mode’ and announce their arrival after hitting their first milestone (such as a successful funding round or product prototype), but given that a decade ago, there wasn’t one incorporated company working on this technology, we’ve come a long way!
2) There are now dozens of types of cultivated animal flesh from quail to fish to foie gras
While that first burger tasting was for a beef burger, there are numerous kinds of cultivated meat being developed. Where Dr Mark Post’s Mosa Meat and Israeli startup Aleph Farms are focused on the cow, companies like GOOD Meat, ClearMeat, SuperMeat and Upside Foods are working on chicken (the latter has also debuted duck and beef products). Pork is another popular alternative, with brands like Meatable, Joes Future Food and Ivy Farm Technologies tackling Asia’s favorite meat.
There’s also cell-cultured seafood, from fish fillets to raw salmon to crustaceans such as prawn and crab. Singapore’s Umami Meats and Shiok Meats, and California’s Finless Foods and Wildtype Foods are all pioneering this sector.
Apart from these, Orbillion Bio produces Wagyu beef, in addition to working on elk, lamb and bison alternatives. French startup Gourmey is making cultivated foie gras, and Australia’s Vow want to use this tech to develop kangaroo, zebra, tortoise and yak meat – and it’s already showcased Japanese quail dumplings.
Courtesu: Orbillion Bio
3) Nomenclature continues to be an issue
Cultivated meat, which is the industry’s preferred term, is has many alternative names from cultured meat to clean meat to synthetic meat to the industry’s least preferred term: lab-grown.
Research published in Nature Portfolio found ‘lab-grown’ to be the least favourable term among consumers (alongside ‘artificial meat’) too, while ‘cell-cultured’ and ‘cell-cultivated’ were the most popular. This is echoed by a 2021 GFI survey of 44 industry CEOs, 75% of whom preferred ‘cultivated’ meat. And in 2022, APAC stakeholders signed a memorandum of understanding declaring ‘cultivated’ as the preferred English-language term for these alternatives.
Mainstream media reporters continue to use the term lab-grown despite repeated requests from industry to stop doing so. One main reason journalists should rethink the term? It’s inaccurate. In fact, cultivated meat at commercial scale is not produced (or grown) in a lab environment. Rather, like most foods in our supermarkets, it is made in a food factory.
In 2021, Upside Foods strongly discouraged the use of terms like ‘lab-grown’ or ‘lab-based’, ‘synthetic’ and ‘fake’. It argued that ‘lab-grown’ suggests cultivated meat would always be made in a lab – but once it scales up, it could likely be made in a food-production-like environment. “The labelling of cultivated meat and poultry products will be a crucial component of how our industry conveys the basic nature, essential characteristics, and value of these products to consumers,” the company said.
4) Removing FBS from production is key to the industry’s long-term sustainability
One of the biggest controversies surrounding cultivated meat is the use of fetal bovine serum, a growth medium derived from cows. The use of this serum meant cell-cultured meat produced with it wasn’t animal-free – since it relied upon genetically altering animal cells – and Mosa Meat called the ingredient “not sustainable, reliable or scalable”.
The Dutch company ditched the serum in 2019, and last year published its formulation for developing a serum-free way to produce cultivated meat. “Using a method called RNA sequencing, we can study the changes in gene expression that the cells undergo when they differentiate into muscle,” the company said. It paved the way for companies across this sector to develop serum-free offerings.
Japanese startup IntegriCulture also developed cultivated chicken and duck liver cells using a serum-free medium, and South Korea’s CellMEAT created a serum-free cell culture medium to drive down production costs and provide an ethical cell-cultured meat option.
In fact, many of the more established cultivated meat companies are either phasing out or no longer using FBS in their production but the controversy remains, especially for industry detractors.
Courtesy: CellMEAT
5) Total funding to date for cultivated meat startups is close to $3B
In its latest report, GFI report states that cultivated meat startups have raised a total of $2.78 billion in venture funding since 2016. In 2022, the sector reeled in $896 million – and while this was a 33% year-on-year drop, the amount still outperformed the overall global VC funding decline of 35% year-on-year.
Europe saw higher investments in cell-cultured meat last year than in 2021, while Asia Pacific companies raised more capital in 2022 than any other year. It was also the year that saw the largest single deals for both a cultivated meat (Upside Foods) and seafood company (Wildtype Foods), while the number of unique investors also grew year-on-year by 19% to 679.
Courtesy: Upside Foods
6) Governments around the world are (slowly) starting to fund cultivated meat
Amidst a worsening climate crisis and more frequent food supply disruptions, governments around the world are increasingly looking to future food technologies as potential solutions as part of national food security strategies.
In 2022, Europe led the world in financing cultured meat research and development. The Netherlands announced a €60M investment – a world record – towards building a cellular agriculture ecosystem, while Norway pledged €10M for a five-year programme to develop cellular agriculture and solve cost and scalability issues. In Spain, a €750,000 grant was given to a biotech company to study cultivated meat industrialisation.
Horizon Europe, the EU’s core innovation and research funding programme, also mentioned cultivated meat and seafood as one of its three core pillars, with around €7M set aside for this sector. Meanwhile, the UK’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council poured £20M into research and development for alt-proteins, which include cell-cultured meat.
Across the Atlantic, the US Department of Agriculture awarded a $10M grant in 2021 to Tufts University to build the National Institute for Cellular Agriculture, which was the first-ever government-funded research project. And in September last year, the Biden administration introduced a biotech programme that includes finances for “foods made with cultured animal cells”. Meanwhile, California allocated $5M for alt-protein research in its state budget, becoming the first US state to invest in research for cultivated meat.
In the Middle East, Israel leads the alt-protein wave. In 2021, it invested $18M to fund the world’s largest cultivated meat consortium, while government funding has contributed $13M to early-stage startups and infrastructure.
Asia also saw an increase in government investments in cultivated meat. South Korea awarded a $15M million grant to cell-based meat startup Space F, while Japan provided a ¥240M ($2.2M) grant to build the country’s first bioreactor for cultured meat production. Meanwhile, Singapore and Israel collaborated to award a joint grant to Steakholder Foods and Umami Meats to develop 3D-printed cultivated grouper fish. Notably, the Singaporean government has made alternative proteins and cultivated meat a key part of its 30 by 2030 food security plan.
7) Only 2 Countries Allow For The Commercial Sale of Cultivated Meat
As of today, only 2 countries have given cultivated meat the regulatory green light.
In 2020, Singapore famously became the first country in the world to approve the sale of cultivated meat after granting regulatory approval to Eat Just, the parent company of GOOD Meat. Since then, a host of companies have flocked to the island nation to pass through its regulatory process and enter the market. Earlier this year, Singapore also became the first country to grant regulatory approval for the use of serum-free media in cultivated meat (also awarded to GOOD Meat).
In June, the US became just the second country on the list to greenlight the sale of cell-cultured meat, as GOOD Meat and Upside Foods passed the premarket regulatory review process for cultivated chicken.
Many countries have regulatory systems in place for alt-proteins, but they are yet to grant approval to companies for sale. The Netherlands has, however, approved cultivated meat and seafood tastings. And in July, Aleph Farms submitted the first regulatory application for cell-cultured meat in Europe, filing for approval in Switzerland. Days later, it also applied for clearance in the UK. But so far, no cultured meat company has filed for regulatory approval in the EU. Israel is another locus of activity with more cultivated meat companies per capita than almost anywhere, and pundits have predicted it could be next for regulatory approval, but so far, the jury is still out.
Courtesy: Good Meat
8) Only a small handful of restaurants in the world have served diners cultivated meat
Currently, only a handful of restaurants across the globe are selling cultivated meat, with Singapore’s regulatory approval paving the way for eateries to debut these alternatives. In 2020, after the approval was granted, 1880 became the world’s first restaurant to serve cultivated meat, namely GOOD Meat’s chicken. This was followed by JW Marriot’s Madame Fan restaurant, which replaced all chicken items on its menu with GOOD Meat’s product in 2021, and Huber’s Butchery and Bistro, which also introduced the company’s cultivated chicken on its menu in 2022 where it remains on the menu today.
And in July, San Francisco’s Bar Crenn, owned by chef Dominique Crenn, became the first US restaurant to serve cultivated meat in the US – with Upside Foods’ chicken – followed a week later by chef José Andrés’s Washington DC eatery China Chilcano, also serving GOOD Meat’s cell-cultured chicken.
9) From cultivated meat to cell-base coffee, chocolate and fur: how the industry’s tech inspired alternatives beyond food
While the technology for cultivated meat was originally developed to make a slaughter-free alternative to animal flesh, the industry inspired entrepreneurs and scientists from all kinds of other sectors to use the science to find cell-based alternatives to other high-emission products. Several companies are producing an animal-free alternative to dairy Indo-American startup Brown Foods, Canada’s Opalia, and Israel’s Wilk, which makes yoghurt from cultivated milk fat. Meanwhile, startups like Australia’s Me& and US-based Biomilq are pioneering cultivated breast milk.
There’s also cultivated chocolate, with startups like Israel’s Celleste Bio and California Cultured leading the pack. The latter is now also working on cell-based coffee, something researchers from Finland’s VTT Technical Research Centre say they developed in 2021 with French startup Stem working on the beanless coffee alternative too.
10) Cultivated meat and price parity: an ongoing battle
Alongside regulatory approval, the cost of these products is the biggest obstacle for the cultivated meat industry to overcome. But there have been major steps forward in this area. 10 years after Dr Post and his team’s showcased the first beef burger tasting in what reportedly cost over $300,000 for two patties, the cost is now closer to approximately $100 per pound (some companies have suggested a few hundred per pound, others have quoted under $100, so this is an average) thanks to continuous R&D and production scaling.
While at Bar Crenn, Upside Foods’ chicken is part of a six-course $150 prix fixe tasting menu – on par with (or cheaper than) many fine-dining tasting menus, the company is likely losing money per serve (hence the very limited availability of the menu), and we are still a while away from cultivated meat being able to compete with conventional meat or even plant-based meat
While GFI predicts that cultivated meat could reach cost parity with its traditional counterparts by as early as 2030 and further analysis by industry supplier Ark Biotech highlighted how cost-competitive cultivated meat could be a reality, many industry insiders are more cautious. Startups want to scale, but a lack of bioreactor facilities, a need for more funding, and the high cost of media (including FBS-free serum) mean the industry is unlikely to compete with supermarket beef chuck anytime soon.