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 host of developments for plant-based giants, corporate moves and a vegan meal donation campaign.
New products and launches
It’s a big week for big plant-based brands. Let’s start with Beyond Meat, which has extended its partnership with Pizza Hut UK through the launch of its pepperoni in the country, which features in the Big New Yorker and Beyond Pepperoni Feast pizzas, as well as the Beyond Pepperoni Melt.
Courtesy: Beyond Meat
It’s not the only pizza partnership going for Beyond Meat. In the US, it collaborated with vegan frozen brand Blackbird Foods for a relaunched version of the latter’s pepperoni pizza. Blackbird argues that Beyond’s pepperoni is meatier than its original house pepperoni, and the pizza will be available nationwide in retailers including The Fresh Market, Central Market, Earthfare and select Whole Foods stores.
Fellow Californian plant-based meat giant Impossible Foods has announced that it is the Official Plant-Based Burger of Walt Disney World Resort. The company, which has a fantastic track record for foodservice partnerships, has been working with Disney for three years.
Staying in this area, Bay Area company Eat Just – another vegan leader – has updated the product packaging for its mung-based JUST Egg. It will begin rolling out at Target and other retailers this month, with nationwide (and Canadian) availability expected by March 2024.
Courtesy: Eat Just
Swedish oat milk leader Oatly has had a busy week too. It has expanded its foodservice footprint with Insomnia Cookies, which will house its 11oz plain and chocolate oat milks across its over 250 locations in the US.
Meanwhile, in Spain, Better Balance has introduced three veggie burgers with a Nutri-Score A rating. The Huerta (peas, carrots and peppers), Eggplant and Spinach Burgers are available in El Corte Inglés, Carrefour, and Alcampo supermarkets.
Fellow Spanish brand Cocuus, which debuted its 3D-printed vegan bacon in Carrefour earlier this month, is prepping for a UK launch with the plant-based bacon analogue. Plus, vegan foie gras and tuna are planned for the months to follow.
In other pig-based meat alternatives news, German meat manufacturer Rügenwalder Mühle is continuing its link-up with fashion photographer Paul Ripke with a cleverly named Paulled Pork snack, which resembles a char siu bao and is part of the brand’s Veganuary campaign.
Also in Germany, dairy giant Bauer is teaming up with Austrian upcycled food company Kern Tec to launch ZUM GLÜCK!, an alt-dairy brand that leverages the latter’s apricot kernel fat. The milks and yoghurts will be available in January.
Courtesy: Eat Just
Over in the UK, vegan yoghurt maker The Coconut Collaborative has joined the plant-based milk world too, with a barista coconut M*LK that it swears froths, doesn’t split, and keeps a neutral flavour. It will initially launch through Ocado, with a wider rollout from January.
Meanwhile, discount retailer Aldi is reportedly expanding its own-label meatless offerings with a spin-off of its Plant Menu range, called Veggie Menu. Its IP filings have revealed that it will include cheese spreads, vegetarian sausages and quiches.
Away from retail for a second, London-based cocoa-free chocolate maker WNWN Food Labs has launched wholesale packs of its dark and vegan milk chocolates for bakeries, restaurants/foodservice, confectionery groups, and CPG/FMCG companies globally – something the brand hinted at in an interview with Green Queen in August.
Fresh off its first national TV campaign with Grace Dent – where it pointedly hit home on the health aspect of its vegan chicken – British plant-based brand THIS has updated its chicken pieces with a cleaner label, with a 50% cut in the number of ingredients.
In more British chicken news, VFC has entered the frozen category with two new SKUs: a plant-based chicken breast and chicken mince, which it claims is first to market. They will initially launch in Morrisons stores, with a wider rollout anticipated in 2024.
Courtesy: VFC
Speaking of mince, Singapore’s Good Health Farm, which debuted the world’s first tempeh beef mince in August, will be launching into 13 Fairprice stores in the city-state, with a sampling campaign, promotional pricing and local celeb chef Forest Leong.
The tempeh market is fermenting in India too, with Hello Tempayy releasing its new line of shelf-stable, tikka-style marinated tempeh thins in Tandoori, Korean BBQ and Thai Chilli flavours. These are available nationwide via online delivery.
In Australia, plant protein manufacturer The Harvest B has gained a listing on Woolworths‘ online platform Healthylife, which will stock the former’s locally produced lamb, chicken, beef and pork analogues.
And in news that will delight plant-based meat fans, Israeli 3D-printed meat producer Redefine Meat is entering European retail after expanding into foodservice footprint to 5,000 locations over the last year and a half. Its retail rollout will begin with the UK, the Netherlands and Sweden.
Funding and markets
In Germany, sugar giant Nordzucker will invest €100M ($109.5M) in the production of plant-based proteins, with a new dedicated facility planned for a 2026 opening, which will create around 60 jobs.
Similarly, Israeli mycelium meat producer Mush Foods – which provides its ingredient for use in blended meat applications – has been awarded $250,000 in the Grow-NY Food and Agriculture Business Competition.
In the UK, meat alternatives could account for a third of the nation’s protein market by 2040, according to a report by UK think tank the Social Market Foundation.
Meanwhile, in Italy, seven agrifood startups have been chosen for the FoodSeed Accelerator, including cocoa-free chocolate maker Foreverland, ozonated oil startup Agreen Biosolutions, and water management service Soonapse.
Dutch vegan cheese maker Willicroft has launched a crowdfunding campaign on the back of unveiling its plant-based butter, which is made using precise (not precision) fermentation – there’s a difference!
M&A and corporate moves
Canada’s Protein Powered Farms has acquired Lovingly Made Ingredients, the plant protein extrusion facility built and previously owned by Meatless Farm. It will offer customised protein blends, pea and fava proteins for alt-dairy and snack applications, and pulses-based fibre products, and be open for co-manufacturing opportunities.
And in the UK, artisanal vegan cheese maker Palace Culture has been acquired by The Compleat Food Group (formerly Winterbotham Darby), which owns fellow plant-based brands Squeaky Bean and Vadasz.
Courtesy: Palace Culture
This week has also seen quite a few corporate personnel moves in the food world. Jean Madden, who has been the chief marketing officer of TiNDLE Foods for three years, is now the brand’s chief operating officer and has been formally named as a co-founder of the company (she was part of the original 4-person founding team).
Beyond Meatreally is going full-tilt on the health aspects of plant-based meat. It has hired an official nutrition advisor in Joy Bauer, a registered dietitian and host of NBC’s Health & Happiness show and the health and nutrition expert on The Today Show.
Meanwhile, changes are afloat at Boston food tech firm Motif FoodWorks, whose CEO Dr Mike Leonard has departed and been replaced by industry veteran Brian Brazeau as the company embarks on a fresh round of layoffs.
Manufacturing, policy and events
Told you it’s been a busy week for Oatly. Toronto-based food packaging company Ya YA Food Corp. has announced a $92M investment into the expansion of its Business Depot Ogden plant in Utah – this was previously taken over from Oatly as part of the oat milk maker’s ‘asset-light supply chain strategy’, and will keep manufacturing oat milk and expand production for Oatly.
In Lisbon, biotech company MicroHarvest has opened a pilot plant to accelerate the commercialisation of its biomass-fermented single-cell protein. The 200 sq m plant can churn out 25kg of product per day.
Swiss equipment manufacturer Bühler has opened a new food innovation hub in Uzwil, Switzerland, which will house four application centres for food, flavour, protein and energy recovery. These will enable the development of processes to produce plant-based meat, drinks and ingredients – among other foods.
In the UK, while the King’s Speech left out some key social issues, it did include an animal welfare bill that will see the export of livestock for fattening and slaughter permanently banned.
Speaking of social issues, vegan supplements brand Complement, which has donated one plant-based meal to children in need for each product sold, has announced a no-purchase-necessary campaign through Christmas, where all you need to do is sign up to its emails, and it will donate a meal to kids globally.
Meanwhile, a study by the University of California, Irvinesays monocropping foods like soy, corn and palm for cooking oils are highly detrimental to the climate, and lab-grown fats – take your pick – can save tons of land, water and emissions.
Courtesy: Sodexo
To promote more eco-friendly eating, Sodexohosted its global Sustainable Chef Challenge, where eight of its chefs faced off to create two low-carbon practical dishes that minimised food waste. The winners were its UK and Ireland chef Sharon McConnell and Brazilian chef Ricardo Machado.
British plant-based meat brand Moving Mountainspartnered with food emissions expert Klimato for a life-cycle assessment of its products, and revealed that its burger emits 92% less CO2e than beef.
As we approach the end of the year, awards season is upon us too. Vegan Women Summit has announced its inaugural VWS Awards to commemorate leaders and organisations accelerating women’s leadership with positive social, planetary and animal welfare impact. There are nine categories – including founder of the year and best place to work – and nominations are open until December 31.
And finally, Toronto held the 2023 International Vegan Film Festival and Vegan Cookbook Contest last week, with The Smell of Money among the winners in the former category, and PlantYou by Carleigh Bodrug winning in the latter.
The cultivated meat sector is seeing a flurry of activity from startups announcing new production facilities across the globe, as teams work to accelerate the scaling and commercialisation of cell-cultured alternatives to conventional meat.
A handful of cultivated meat startups have made headlines with news of production plants and facilities across countries like Australia, China, Israel, Singapore, the US and Malaysia, despite recent reporting detailing scaling and funding challenges. A growing number of companies are advancing in their scaling plans with larger-scale factories, pilot plants and demonstration facilities. While some of these are already operational, others are under construction, and others still are at the planning stages, all are continuing to hit milestones and make progress.
Meatable’s new pilot plant
Courtesy: Meatable
Dutch cultivated pork producer Meatable is having some year. In August, it nabbed $35M in a Series B round (taking total investment in the company to $95M). In October, it hosted its second cultured meat tasting of the year in Singapore, ahead of a planned 2024 launch. And now, to advance that very plan, it has opened a new pilot facility in its home country.
Its new pilot plant at the Bio Science Park in Leiden, the Netherlands spans 3,300 sq m (35,521 sq ft), which is double the size of its previous office and lab space. “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,” Meatable COO Carolien Wilschut told Green Queen last month. The new facility will be able to increase the bioreactor capacity to 200 litres, and potentially 500 litres.
“This is an important step for us in scaling up,” Wilschut added. The facility will expand Meatable’s ability to test and produce large volumes of cultivated pork in preparation for its foodservice launch next year in Singapore, where it has partnered with contract manufacturer ESCO Aster (the only approved cultured meat manufacturer in Singapore) as well as plant-based meat brand Love Handle to co-produce hybrid meat products.
The company has already applied for regulatory approval in Singapore – and is also looking into the only other country that has cleared the sale of cultivated meat. “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,” co-founder and CEO Krijn de Nood told Green Queen in August.
On the new Leiden plant, he said: “It is fantastic to see how we have grown from an idea of two entrepreneurs five years ago into a mature company with a tangible product that can transform how we eat meat. In this new facility, we can further scale the company’s processes and accelerate commercial launch.”
Newform Foods’ demo facility
Courtesy: Newform Foods
In South Africa, Newform Foods (formerly Mzansi Meat) – Africa’s first cultivated meat startup – has partnered with engineering giant Project Assignments on a demonstration facility, which is touted to be the largest of its kind in the continent.
The two companies are collaborating to design a blueprint to introduce Newform Foods’ B2B bioproduction platform globally. This model will enable food producers and retailers to expand their offerings by creating cultivated meat products “without the burden of intensive R&D and associated costs”.
The demo plant aims to showcase to food businesses how they can incorporate cultivated meat products into their existing facilities, facilitating and curating “a cell line of interest”, developing a prototype, and scaling the process.
“We want to create an end-to-end service from prototype to pilot and beyond, simplifying the journey from lab to market. We’re excited to be putting our plans into action, working with Project Assignments who are masters of their craft,” said Newform Foods co-founder and CEO Brett Thompson. “This will be an amazing opportunity to show the world what our bioproduction platform can do at scale.”
Newform Foods – which raised $130,000 in pre-seed funding last year – has already unveiled its cultivated beef burger and lamb meatballs, and plans to create cell-cultured mince, sausages, steaks, chicken and nuggets in the future, with a focus on meat cuts suited to classic African dishes.
Magic Valley’s co-manufacturing plant
Courtesy: Magic Valley
Australia’s first cultured lamb producer, Magic Valley, has expanded into a new pilot facility at bio-innovator and incubator Co-Labs. The company – which debuted its lamb last year, followed by cultivated pork earlier this year – says the facility can help scale production capacity up to 3,000-litre bioreactors and produce up to 150,000kg of product annually.
“We are excited to embark on this expansion journey at Co-Labs, which will greatly amplify our production capacity,” said Magic Valley CEO Paul Bevan, who said the establishment of the pilot plant “also reaffirms our position as a major player on the global stage”.
“It’s been amazing to witness the growth and development of Magic Valley during their time at Co-Labs and we’re committed to supporting their journey ahead for a more sustainable future,” added Co-Labs co-founder Andrew Gray.
Magic Valley collaborated with Washington-based Biocellion SPC earlier this year to optimise its production by enhancing its bioreactor design. The company says its cultivated meat products can emissions by reduce 92%, land use by 95%, and water use by 78% compared to their conventional counterparts.
Omeat’s pilot plant for cost-effective cultivated meat
Courtesy: Omeat
Los Angeles startup Omeat, which launched from stealth mode in June, has completed the production of its 15,000 sq ft pilot plant. The new facility is part of the startup’s unique vertically integrated approach and can produce up to 400 tons of product annually.
The plant will deliver essential data and insights for scaling up production and ensuring quality, flavour and safety. Omeat says the completion of the plant will enable it to “demonstrate the intricacies of its process at scale, establishing a clear path for regulatory review and approval”.
In August, the startup – which raised $40M in an oversubscribed Series A round last year – launched its B2B arm by revealing it has already completed the first commercial sales of its ethical and affordable alternative to fetal bovine serum, Plenty, which is available to purchase for cultured meat producers.
“We’re pioneering a very unique farm-to-table approach that enables us to create delicious real meat with a fraction of the resources needed to produce conventional meat. It’s a more humane and sustainable way to satisfy the growing global appetite for meat,” said Omeat founder & CEO Ali Khademhosseini. “We remain confident that at scale, Omeat’s prices will be less than conventional meat, providing accessibility to high-quality protein worldwide.”
Cultivated pioneers face scaling challenges
It’s not all rosy, though. The only two companies to have earned US regulatory approval to sell cultivated meat – Upside Foods and Eat Just’s GOOD meat, both of whom are working on chicken– both previously announced industrial-scale facilities. The former broke ground on a 187,000 sq ft factory in Glenview, Illinois, which it says can eventually produce 30 million pounds of meat and seafood annually (Upside acquired cultivated seafood company Cultured Decadence in early 2022), while the latter had signed an agreement for a US facility that will house 10 250,000-litre bioreactors, which it says will be capable of making 30 million lbs of meat.
However, both companies are facing scaling and prouction difficulties. In two separate investigations by Wired, it was revealed that Upside Foods’ chicken served at San Fransico restaurant Bar Crenn wasn’t grown in bioreactors, but rather in non-scalable tiny bottles.
Similarly, Eat Just is allegedly in legal and financial trouble after failing to pay a number of its vendors, for which it has faced several lawsuits – this includes ABEC, the company commissioned to build those 10 bioreactors. As a result, co-founder and CEO Josh Tetrick says the company is no longer working on that bioreactor deal, or the facility they were meant to be housed in.
Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just and its cultivated meat subsidiary GOOD Meat, has been named in the inaugural TIME100 Climate list of influential business leaders – the only person from the alternative protein industry to be chosen.
TIME describes its newly-debuted TIME100 Climate list as “an argument for how we see the future”, asserting that climate progress will come from “engagement with and leadership by the business world”. It published the inaugural list yesterday, with famous names ranging from Stella McCartney and Bill Gates to Billie Eilish and Coldplay.
Tetrick, whose California-based company is the maker of plant-based Just Egg (famous for its vegan liquid egg and frozen vegan egg patty) and the parent of cultivated meat entity GOOD Meat, is the only leader from this sector to be named as one of the 100 most influential climate pioneers in the world.
Tetrick was recognised for his company’s efforts to bring the world’s first cell-cultured meat to market – in Singapore three years ago – and for being one of the only two companies to be approved by the USDA to sell cultivated meat in the United States.
“I think individuals can make the choice to solve one part of our climate challenge by choosing to eat in a way that causes less harm,” Tetrick told TIME. “Less harm to themselves and to the planet. And this choice doesn’t require one dollar of new spending or any food technology company like ours to make cultivated or plant-based meats. It just takes an awareness of the problem and a will to take agency to solve it.”
Food accounts for a third of all global emissions, and meat is responsible for 60% of that share. Cultivated meat can emit 92% fewer emissions than conventional beef, reduce meat-production-related air pollution by 94%, and require 90% less land, according to peer-reviewed research.
Courtesy: Eat Just
Why the Eat Just founder made the TIME100 Climate list
The TIME100 Climate list was compiled after months of research and vetting by the magazine’s climate action platform TIME CO2. Its six-person team prioritised nominees from five systems crucial to change, aligning with scientific and economic consensus: energy, nature, finance, culture and health.
TIME CO2 valued measurable and scalable achievements over commitments and announcements, favouring more recent action. “The inaugural TIME100 Climate list produced no single perfect instance of complete climate action, but multitudes of individuals making significant progress in fighting climate change by creating business value,” wrote TIME CO2’s Marcius Extavour.
Asked what sustainability effort he hopes would gain more mainstream popularity over the next year, Tetrick said that while the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is paramount, so too is a shift away from the factory farming of billions of animals as a primary food source.
“That system causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined, and it’s getting worse every day. The effort is a simple one: choose to eat foods – mostly plant-based – that cause less harm to our planet,” he explained.
In response to a question asking about why climate tech isn’t getting enough attention, Tetrick unsurprisingly highlighted cultivated meat. “We believe that making meat without the large-scale slaughter of animals requires new technologies, including cultivating meat from a single cell and turning that into meat through a process of feeding and culturing those cells in vessels, similar to brewing beer,” he noted.
“The need for more funding, more attention and more government”
Courtesy: Eat Just
Tetrick added: “Cultivating meat is in its early days, and more attention and funding are needed to accelerate its rise to the top of the system of meat production.” It’s a point he touched upon on the Green Queen in Conversation: Cultivated Meat Pioneers podcast in September, the Eat Just founder told host and Green Queen founding editor Sonalie Figueiras that he wished infrastructure could be built faster, for which more capital is necessary.
“If you had instead of hundreds of millions, you had hundreds of billions, you would go faster,” he said. “You could build infrastructure faster, you could design and engineer the vessels. You could hire more people, you could accelerate research and development.” This additional capital, he stated, could come from both private and public funding, with Tetrick noting that he agrees that more money, attention and government support would accelerate this industry.
GOOD Meat has been recognized on multiple ‘best of’ lists including as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies,” Entrepreneur’s “100 Brilliant Companies,” CNBC’s “Disruptor 50” and a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. JUST Egg has been named among Popular Science’s “100 Greatest Innovations” and Fast Company’s “World Changing Ideas” and the history-making debut of GOOD Meat was heralded as one of 2020’s top scientific breakthroughs by The Guardian, Vox and WIRED.
The below conversation is the transcript of the fourth episode of the podcast miniseries Green Queen in Conversation: Cultivated Meat Pioneers featuring George Peppou, founder and CEO of Vow, interviewed by show host Sonalie Figueiras. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
In the fourth episode of Green Queen in Conversation – Cultivated Meat Pioneers, Sonalie Figueiras talks to George Peppou, the CEO of Australian startup Vow. Peppou is one of the most compelling leaders in the cultivated meat space today because his vision for the future of food is so unique. This is evident in everything his company does, from the animals Vow is choosing to cultivate to how his team approaches branding and marketing.
During our chat, we talked about how he thinks about the future of cultivated meat, THAT mammoth meatball, why he’s doing this and who he’s doing it for, and whether cultivated meat will one day be a mass product. George is so utterly committed to what he’s doing that when you’re listening to him, it’s hard not to believe that he’s going to change the way we eat for the better. So here goes.
Sonalie Figueiras: Hi, George. Great to have you here. Thanks for being a guest on our podcast. I’ve been watching everything you’ve been doing in the space and I’m excited to talk to you about cultivated meat, including what the industry is doing, and where we are going from here. I really want to start with this idea of exotic meats. You are working with zebras, alpaca, buffalo, and crocodile cells. Why exotic meats? Why not the basics like beef or pork?
George Peppou: It’s a great question. It’s one that I get asked quite a lot. The very short answer is I love eating meat. I eat meat. I’m not a vegan or a vegetarian. When I think about how can I change the behavior of people like me, like my family, it’s not going to be by making something which approximates the meat we eat today, that’s a very hard sell for people that already have integrated meat into their diets and have no intention of changing that. So, then the question is, how do you change the behavior of a few billion meat eaters that have no interest in changing their diet?
I believe the way that we do that is we have to make foods that are better than the meat that we can get today: tastier, more nutritious, offering functionality that animals can’t. So, the goal for us within the world of cultured meat is how do we identify the cells from across all of nature, that are the cheapest to grow, the tastiest, the most nutritious, and offer the best functionalities as food.
The probability of those coming from animals that we traditionally consume is extremely low. So, from the very beginning, we’ve taken this approach of exploring nature, working across a range of different species, like many of the ones you mentioned, with the view of: how do we see these cells as ingredients, as part of future foods? I don’t believe we’re going to be thinking about meat and animals the way we do today even in 50 years. Instead, I think we’re going to view meat as branded products that may contain cells from multiple different species to achieve the qualities of those brands. So, that’s really what we’ve been building up to, by building this cell library exploration, and trying to answer some foundational questions about, such as: why do some cells taste the way they do? Why do some cells have the nutrition they do?
Sonalie Figueiras: That’s really interesting. I was interviewing somebody in the plant-based seafood space today, and they had a very similar take around it, you know, this idea that we need to create new formats, new products. So, for you, you’re seeing a future where some kind of protein format that we could eat could have multiple animal cells in there. So, the idea is not to just recreate crocodile or zebra meat.
George Peppou: Not at all. So, one way that I think about this is if you went back to 150 years ago, standing around in the 1880s, and you try to grab someone off the street and explain to them what a Cheerio is when they’ve only ever bought and consumed grains as a simple transformation of one grain… trying to explain what a Cheerio is, how it’s made, why you’d eat it, it would be impossible.
I think the same thing is going to be true 50 years from now with meat. We’re going to think about meat, and we’re going to buy meat purely as branded products, and whatever components we need to use to create the sensory experience or whatever functions that product provides, we’re going to do that. We’re going to view it as something which has a sensory experience and a reason to purchase it because you’ve had it before, and because you know about it and have integrated it into your lifestyle.
Sonalie Figueiras: So, that’s quite a different mission than some of the other players in the space, who are trying to recreate, let’s say, a chicken breast.
George Peppou: That sale has been quite different. I was having a bit of a debate with someone online, which is always a dangerous thing to do, and their argument was, with limited capital going into the space, why should any of it go towards weird stuff? My argument is kind of the exact opposite, which is with limited capital going into the space, is allocating 99% of it or 98% of it to replicating beef, chicken, pork, tuna and salmon the best way to change the behaviour of a few billion people? I see what we’re doing as a hedge against how behaviour change is going to happen. If we’re right, and everyone else is wrong, then it’s going to really matter that we exist, but we can also be right alongside all the companies that are making beef, chicken and pork, and together, we can be tackling different parts of that behaviour change problem for different segments of consumers.
Sonalie Figueiras: Okay, so let me ask you a follow-up question: What do most people get wrong about cultivated meat itself and about the science of cultivated meat?
George Peppou: Oh, that’s a really good question. I think there’s a lot of general misinformation and misinterpretation about what it is technically. There’s a well-known skeptic, who posts a lot and publishes a lot on this, a guy called Paul Wood from Melbourne, Australia, and I remember, after Paul Wood popped up in some very critical articles, I reached out. We had a chat, and he said something to me that stuck with me: “Oh, this is not a question of technical feasibility, the technology absolutely works. I’ve worked in large-scale cell culture my whole career.”
So, I think there’s a belief that the large-scale cell culture is fundamentally novel and a fundamentally new technology, but it’s not. What we’re trying to do is take very well-established technology, and do it at a larger scale with lower cost and with less human labor and effort than it’s ever been done before. So, while there are certainly scientific challenges and there’s not any foundation or manufacturing, we’re not trying to do anything that hasn’t been done before. So, I think that’s the main foundational misunderstanding, that this is a crazy, new frontier invention. There is a little bit of that, but that’s not what this industry takes to get food on people’s plates.
Sonalie Figueiras: That’s interesting, and yeah, I know who you’re referring to because he’s actually one of the board members for cellular agriculture in Australia, I think.
George Peppou: Absolutely, yes.
Sonalie Figueiras: There are different opinions in the space, but why don’t we kind of bring it down to a really basic level: how would you explain cultivated meat to a six-year-old or an eight-year-old?
George Peppou: [laughter] Oh, that’s a really good question. I was trying to explain this to my friend’s four-year-old on the weekend and failed…
Sonalie Figueiras: I was gonna say four years old because I have a four-year-old, and then I thought it was a bit of a high bar[laughter].
George Peppou: Yeah, with a four-year-old, I got about 30 seconds and she got bored and started watching Bluey. So I did my best, but I failed [laughter]. However, if it was a six to eight-year-old, I would start by saying the meat that you’re eating is how animals grow, and all we do is take some parts of animals and grow them outside of an animal, which is really as simple as you can get. Then we feed the cells that we’re growing, we feed the bits of the animal that we’re growing, the things that they directly need to grow the sugars, the salts, the amino acids, all the bits and pieces they need to grow, and then when we grow enough of them, we take those out, and we put them on your plate. That would be the simplest version of it, and I can hear my process engineers screaming in pain from the side – “They’re not mentioning all of the details and the sterility requirements!” However, at its simplest, it’s just taking those cells that you’d find in meat and growing them outside of an animal.
Sonalie Figueiras: That does feel simple and accessible. And from what your answer to the previous question in terms of the science, we have it. Yet, it feels like a new frontier to most people, right?
George Peppou: Yes, absolutely. It’s a very new way of thinking about food. I’ve spent a lot of my career working in food and agriculture, and there has been a global paradigm for it for such a long time that all of our food is some kind of agricultural product – something that grows in the field that goes through some kind of conversion step. Even our most frontier industrialization of animal agriculture is just taking a chicken, a cow, or a pig out of a field and putting it in a shed or a multistory building. However, it’s still this fundamental paradigm that if there’s an organism we’ve identified and we grow it in controlled conditions, then we take some part of that and process it in some way, and then it lands on your plate. Cultivated meat feels alien and scary because it’s a different paradigm, where you’re doing most of the processing steps without using a whole organism that we found and domesticated over thousands of years. We’re doing it much, much faster, in a way that resembles the manufacturing of so many other things that we produce. That does feel very different to a lot of people.
Sonalie Figueiras: Absolutely, and if we think about consumer perception as a topic, while we don’t have a lot to go on, early studies show that certain types of consumers, younger consumers especially, are more climate aware. And Asian consumers tend to be more open to the idea of cultivated meat than, for example, certain people in the US and Europe. On the other hand, a lot is going on in mainstream media that suggests that there are these kinds of biases against the technology and the idea of cultivated meat. How do you think about consumer perception?
George Peppou: I think consumers don’t buy technology, and I think a lot of the narratives, a lot of these consumer studies focus a lot on the technology. The way that I think about it is we need to make food, we need to make products, we need to make meats that are so tasty that if they were to land on your plate, you would eat it, you would love it, and you would ask for more. That is the main way that we’re going to change consumer perception, and if that delicious food is also meeting a need of a particular segment of customers, then that’s how we believe we will start to gain that consumer acceptance and consumer perception. I think a lot about Impossible Foods, and how rapidly the idea of genetically modified bacteria producing blood that you add to a bunch of plant-based stuff went from being this radical, wacky mad science to just boring. It sort of happened in one leap, it didn’t happen in a step-by-step process. It was there, you tried it, and then maybe you tried it a second time, then it was just kind of on the supermarket shelf, and no one gave it a second look, and that was that. I suspect we’re going to see a very similar thing over the next couple of years in cultured meat, that it’s going to be boring, faster than we’d like it to be, and the technology is not going to be very interesting or entertaining for very long.
Sonalie Figueiras: It’s interesting that you mentioned Impossible Foods today because it’s kind of a special day today in the Impossible Foods timeline. It’s exactly seven years ago to the day that the first public photo of an Impossible Foods burger was shared online by New York-based Momofuku chef and owner Dave Chang, who shared it and said, “Today I tasted the future. I can’t really comprehend its impact quite yet. I think it might change the whole game.” And here we are sitting here seven years later and Impossible Foods is in my supermarket. I use itonce every couple of weeks to make lasagna. What would you take away from how they did it? What do you want to emulate?
George Peppou: There’s so much that they did so well, and there’s so many things that I would choose not to repeat when it comes to Impossible. Their marketing- the way they presented the science- is the bar. The way they did the early marketing that described him, the way they presented, it was just a masterclass in how to normalize something so wild and so new. Their go-to-market [strategy] with chefs like Dave Chang, and Tracy Jardiniere in San Francisco, it’s a playbook that’s been followed by so many other people. Where I look at Impossible and think about how I would do things very differently is around the consumer angle- there’s not really any selfish driver to purchase Impossible.
It’s a direct, drop-in replacement for beef mince. It’s so meaty that it sort of has been seen by meat eaters, and it’s like, “what is any individual meathead getting out of incorporating impossible into their diet?” So, when I think about what I want to do differently to them, it’s how do we find, and how do we really exploit the selfish drivers that are going to get people that love eating meat and want to be eating meat to choose something that’s produced far more sustainably and selfishly. Impossible doesn’t have that.
There’s not really anything in it for me to make my lasagna out of Impossible. In fact, there are reasons not to: it’s more expensive and it’s a bit of a hard choice because I have had to make a conscious decision to do something differently than I would otherwise want to. At least in my experience, I just don’t feel great after eating it. So, it has that junk food feel that makes me feel a bit slow and lethargic in a way that beef doesn’t. So, there are reasons not to [eat it], but there is nothing pushing me towards doing it and towards incorporating it into my diet.
Sonalie Figueiras: Interesting. So how did they get the buy in the first place?
George Peppou: Their narrative, along with Beyond, and that of a lot of the alternative meat companies was a simple one, which was if you can make something which you can put next to the traditional meat version and a meat eater can’t tell the difference, then you have access to the full-size of that market. I don’t know how this plays out over the long term. If it was half the price, I think that equation could be different.
However, meat is so artificially cheap through direct subsidies and not paying for the full environmental costs that it’s very hard to see even with almost entirely plant-based products – how do you become cheap enough to be the cheapest option on the shelf, with today’s technology and with the market dynamics that we have today?
So I think the narrative here makes a lot of sense, but it hasn’t played out the way that the early team would have liked it to play out from what I’ve seen, and sort of what I’ve heard through the grapevine.
Sonalie Figueiras: Absolutely. I also think for m there’s a narrative around technology that plays out as well, where at the end of the daywe’re saying “Food is not tech, food is food.”
George Peppou: Yes, yes.
Sonalie Figueiras: So, that’s a big sticking point for where we go from here, and it’s interesting to hear you saying that you think there are going to be these blends and these new formats, because I do feel that I’m starting to hear that more from different players across the different pillars, not just in cultivated, but in plant-based and potentially in fermentation,
George Peppou: One of my friends, who you may know, is Michael Fox from Fable [who makes whole mushroom-based meat alternatives].
Sonalie Figueiras: Of course, yep.
George Peppou: He gave me a call not too long ago, and he said, “Hey, I’ve been thinking and reading a lot,” and when I think about where companies, like a lot of the big plant-based companies, have struggled, it’s that, inherently, when you’re introducing a new product, it is more expensive. It’s more costly than the incumbent offerings, and so the customer segments that are going to be willing to pay that premium, and generally, at least in places like the US, they tend to be health-driven, [they] shop at Whole Foods and [they] are looking for organic, looking for the kind of the premium that comes from being a simple, healthy, nourishing product.
If you look at companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, they were kind of at the other end of that spectrum- they were junk food. In many ways they were pitching themselves as burgers, they were not the sort of thing that [you want] if you’re eating a predominantly vegan or a Whole Foods organic diet.
So that’s another lens in question, how do you position it? How do you start to introduce products in the first few years of your business that get adopted by those premium grocery consumers who are looking for things which are clean-label, have short ingredient lists, or add some kind of nutritional benefit to their lifestyle? That’s a very different problem and one that Impossible and Beyond didn’t address. Whether it would have changed their trajectory, who knows?
Sonalie Figueiras: Yeah, but I guess what you’re talking about is something that I think the industry as a whole is struggling with: I don’t know that anyone did proper consumer segmentation. If you look at, a chain like Slutty Vegan, which is going gangbusters in the US, they’re using Impossible patties, and they’re ‘junk food forward’- no apologies, delicious, gooey, yummy burgers that you crave. But if you look at the shopper at Whole Foods, they’re probably looking for what your friend Michael at Fable is doing, which is whole foods, mushroom-based, low perception of processing, right?
George Peppou: Yes.
Sonalie Figueiras: But I think that maybe we need to get away from the idea that every product needs to meet every need...
George Peppou: I definitely agree with that. I think that’s been a big part of how I think about it. When I think about the type of company that we’re building, I don’t see how you create and scale behavioral change with one or two hero products. So implicitly, if you’re replicating a type of meat that already exists, what you’re doing is you’re taking an animal which has this very versatile range of uses, and you’re trying to capture this enormous amount of versatility, and all of those inconveniences we sort of worked around over years into a single product, you also have to make compromises to do that, and those compromises reduce that versatility and reduce the quality of that experience. So, you’re trying to satisfy all possible different markets.
I have a belief which will be very much tested over the next couple of years that as a company, we’re going to create behavioural change by having many products, and ‘mega niches’. So really serving unmet needs and copying and pasting this formula of identifying unmet needs, spinning it up in the same factory, then serving what appears to be a relatively small market, but having economies of scale across product lines. This is entirely untested.
Sonalie Figueiras: That’s super exciting, but what do you mean by mega niche?
George Peppou: So one example is iron availability. If you talk to basically anyone, I have a couple of friends who are dealing with this now, where they’re having to go for iron infusions for various reasons. So, if you go to the doctor, you get a blood test and they say your iron levels are low and usually the first thing you do is you go to the supermarket and you buy five steaks, and you have a steak every night. I know several athletes, serious amateurs and professionals that have had low iron or struggled to maintain iron levels and have eaten lots of beef to try to counteract that. There are a couple of other reasons why we’d also be eating beef. In all of those cases, you’re looking for a product which has the perception of high bioavailable iron and doesn’t have the downsides of either iron infusion or iron pills. In that case, if you’re producing a product that has 10 times the bioavailable iron of beef, then suddenly you’ve got this reasonably large range of consumers that have this common shared need, which is lots of bioavailable iron coming from different sources that you’re moving away from beef consumption in a very specific scenario. So, those are the types of threads that we are very deliberately pulling on.
Sonalie Figueiras: That’s super interesting. I am one of those people that gets iron infusions
George Peppou: [laughter] There are a lot of you! A lot of people get iron infusions.
Sonalie Figueiras: I struggledbecause I do follow a plant-based diet. When I gave birth, I had to go to hospital, because I lost too much iron post-birth. I immediately needed a transfusion four or five days after going home. So your concept of a mega niche is very interesting.
So quite a few times you’ve brought up nutrition as a driver here, and if we talk aboutwho’s going to Whole Foods to grocery shop, there is this kind of health motivation. There is a question that exists and that floats around the cultivated discussion around health, because there is this idea that eating more plants and eating less red meat and reducing certain types of processed meat makes you healthier. Plus there are studies and a lot of research to show that this is the case.
So, the idea of reducing animal foods across your diet aligns with also being healthier, and yet, cultivated meat means keeping those foods in our diet while changing the production method and the costs to society and the environment. How do you think about meat consumption and health? You said that you’re not a vegan or a vegetarian. Do you believe that we should still be eating more plants for health?
George Peppou: I’m not sure about the health reasons. I think nutrition is such a complex field with so many interrelated variables. Annoyingly, some people eat nothing but beef steak and liver and are very healthy, and some people eat nothing but raw vegan diets and are very healthy. My very personal and exclusively anecdotal experience is that I tried to go vegan for about two months, and I abruptly ended up so anaemic that my doctor told me I needed to change my diet back. So, for whatever reason a vegan diet worked incredibly poorly for me, and I probably could have stuck with it, but it just seemed too difficult. So, I think there are ways that you can. We have a lot of anecdotal-in-case evidence of many people who have eaten an omnivorous diet for their entire lives and have been very healthy. Many people have eaten omnivorous diets their entire lives and been very unhealthy. I don’t think it’s as simple as incorporating more or less meat into your diet- and that [meat consumption] is what drives health.
My view on this is as a company that is trying to sell to people who don’t want to change their diets and are choosing to eat meat in whatever production form, we have both an opportunity and a responsibility to be thoughtful and considerate about what the composition of that meat is and how can we ensure it’s both enjoyable to eat and as healthy as possible. How do we reduce the negative effects? How do we increase the quality, quantity and availability of nutrients, and make sure that if it is part of a balanced diet, we’re doing the best things that we can to ensure that it is driving healthy outcomes and good health for anyone that’s consuming it. I think that it is going to become a very rich vein over time. How do we optimize, modify, and alter cultured meat to be the most nourishing substance that you can consume as a protein or an animal protein at the very least? I’m sure the meat industry is screaming at me right now, and saying: No! Meat is already a superfood, you don’t need to change anything! To that I say, Well, let’s find out.
Sonalie Figueiras: I was talking to someone in seafood and they were saying, well, somebody might want all the nutrition from fish, but not maybe, the fishy smell for some people, which is off-putting. So, then you get back to this idea of designing our food, but again, then you get back to this idea that it feels that as humans we have some kind of bias against that, this idea that food is being altered, processed, and sort of isn’t natural. There’s this idea that we’re hardwired to want the natural. However, at the same point in time, one thing that we haven’t talked about here today is where does cultivated meat sit in the discussion of the ethics around consuming meat?
George Peppou: Yes, it’s a it’s a big question.
Sonalie Figueiras: How do you navigate the ethics of it?
George Peppou: The ethics is a sort of endless discussion that we could be having. The way that I think about it is that whatever we’re producing, we need to be very considerate about where that could be causing harm. There are two main ways that I think about that:
One is in the footprint of production- are we producing more waste, more emissions, consuming more water or land than the food that we’re displacing? If the answer to that is yes, then I have a huge problem, and I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. So, that’s something which as we come to market, and as we start to understand how consumers are incorporating this, is it reducing the overall footprint of their diet, and if not, then we need to be very cautious about scaling up until we can change that?
The other is: are we causing direct harm to animals? So, one of the reasons why we’re very intentionally not doing anything with endangered animals, we’re not sampling anything which is critically at risk is, through a fear that they would stimulate wildlife crime. The “Mammoth Meatball” was deliberately an extinct animal, not an existing, alive, endangered animal for that exact reason. We didn’t want to accidentally lead anyone going and poaching something alive just to taste it.
So, those are the two main things I think about with ethics. At the end of the day, because we’re so focused on targeting meat-eaters, it’s all about net reduction, and having a net reduction on the impact, or the animals used in that total diet that any individual is consuming.
Sonalie Figueiras: Okay, I think we need to talk about the “Mammoth Meatball” in a second, because you brought it up, and I want to discuss this idea of extinct versus, you know, endangered. However, at the same time, I want to ask you, is it fair to say that you did not start Vow from an ethical animal welfare point of view, is that not what drove you to this?
George Peppou: No, it’s always been environmental.
Sonalie Figueiras: Okay.
George Peppou: As I said, I eat meat. So, I’m not sort of whipping myself and saying: “No, I shouldn’t do this, this is bad!” I think there are ways that meat can be produced ethically, and I’m very lucky to live in a country like Australia, which has a predominantly very high quality, extensive production system, and the best version of meat production. It’s impossible to scale it ethically. When I look at both the environmental and ethical problems that come from the scale and the intensification of animal production, the question is, how do you reduce the growth in total meat consumption, not displace all of it, but how do you reduce that growth? How do we take a chunk out of the meat consumption that would otherwise exist 20 years down the track?
Sonalie Figueiras: What do you think makes you, George, uniquely qualified to take this on? How do we draw that line between you realizing that as an Australian you’re eating this very high quality meat in terms of animal welfare, probably the least harmful of all the possible harm, right? Yet, we’re in this climate crisis, and you’re looking ahead and you come up with this idea- why you?
George Peppou: I don’t think I am uniquely qualified. I think I had an idea which was different at a time where there was a lot of attention on this issue, and this could have played out very differently. If Impossible had executed the way they expected, and they had displaced beef mince in the way that they had hoped, we wouldn’t be relevant. I think I’m very lucky that the timing of the approach that I thought would work and the timing of how others, how the markets and other companies have performed, have happened to coincide in a very positive way for Vow. However, to be honest, I don’t think there’s anything unique or special about me. I think the one talent that I seem to have is finding people who are far smarter than me to do the hard work while I go on podcasts, and they do the things to make it real.
Sonalie Figueiras: I will come back to that because you must have things that are unique, but let’s talk about your team – Huge wins that they have accomplished. For example, congratulations to them on the execution of the Mammoth Meatball campaign! I have to ask, how did this idea come to be? Whose idea was it? What’s it been like in the aftermath? I mean, you were on Steven Colbert! Every major newspaper and online magazine blogger wrote about this incredible new invention! What were you trying to do with this idea of bringing an extinct mammoth into a cultivated meatball back to life?
George Peppou: The purpose behind this was always very transparently a stunt to draw attention to this idea that the meat in the future doesn’t need to be the same as what we eat today. We were throwing around this concept about three years ago. My co-founder Tim, was like, “I think we should do something weird with extinct animals,” and he happened to get contacted by a guy called from Wunderman Thompson who said, “Oh, I want to make an extinct animal nugget, a dodo nugget.” We were thinking, “Great, this is amazing. This works so perfectly for us!” It was kind of on and off again for a while. Then about a year ago, we couldn’t get the dodo sequence. So, my Chief Scientific Officer James said, “I think we should do it with a Mammoth,” and we were able to track down the mammoth sequence and generate the cell line in partnership with the University of Queensland, Australia. Suddenly, it was off and running, and it was always this very small side project for us. We didn’t spend a cent on PR, I was working in partnership with the guys at Wunderman Thompson, and they spent all the money on the marketing side. So, we didn’t spend a cent ourselves. It was very cheap, very opportunistic, and just a fun way to start the conversation.
About two days beforehand, I had this moment of, “Oh my god, we’re about to launch this Mammoth Meatball, and I have no idea how the world’s going to react. So, we sort of announced it. I went to bed that night, and I woke up to about 200 text messages, and it was just everywhere by the morning. So, this was something that I certainly didn’t expect to receive that level of attention and that level of resonance, but there was something that captured the imagination of so many people. It’s this new technology that means that old things that we haven’t been able to try can suddenly exist again. What has been very entertaining is watching and seeing the evolution of the criticism of it, and you know, the main criticism is like, this is a marketing stunt. I see that and I’m like, “Yes, that’s correct. It is absolutely a marketing stunt. That was very much the plan!” Then the other one is, “Oh, but this undermines this narrative of cultured meat being exactly the same as we eat today,” but for us, that was also part of the plan. So, it’s been very entertaining to watch the evolution of it. I had no expectations, I thought it was going to be less than 1% of what we saw, and I would have been delighted with that. However, it’s been very entertaining to experience what it’s like to go viral, to watch the flames stoke, and then watch the cycle turnover and everyone gets back on with their lives. It’s been a lot of fun, and it’s been very weird.
Sonalie Figueiras: There’s no doubt the team executed it incredibly. I think we had a conversation about it after it came out, and you told me “I wanted everyone to be talking about cultivated meat” and that worked. I still feel that it was another example of how we as humans, on the one hand, are amazed by what technology can do, and on the other hand, there’s sort of like this “ick” factor. There were also people that were asking questions, myself among them like: “Is this responsible? Is this what we should be doing? I was worried about something like this making people more likely to hunt endangered animals, or there’s also this idea of ‘should we make Jurassic Park happen’? What are the ethics of that? You’ve answered that in an interview with me, but for example, the reporter Isaac Schultz at Gizmodo said: “I’m skeptical that the study is going to sell anyone on cultivated meat,” and that’s what I really want to ask you. Do you feel that in the long-term this is turning it around for the average person who may have a bias, a neophobic bias against the idea of cultivated meat? Is it bringing them over the line?
George Peppou: The goal here was never to turn around people that have that bias. I don’t believe that there’s anything that we can say or do. I think about some members of my family who are just completely not interested, this is never something they would even try. There’s nothing I can do or say that’s going to turn those people around. Our goal here was to bring cultured meat into the mainstream conversation, to normalize the idea that it exists, it can be new, and it can be different. For people who are engaged and curious and enjoy new technology, it seems like a large number of them are more engaged than previously. So again, this is very much how we’re approaching it, that’s very different to how all other companies are approaching it. Our goal is very intentionally to try to polarize people, we’re not going to convince people to try something so wild and wacky and new as mixing different species together unless it does have that polarity and that curiosity drive as a result of that. So, that was very much how we approached this, but no, I don’t think it’s going to persuade anyone who wouldn’t otherwise try cultured meat to give it a shot. Also, I don’t believe it was irresponsible. It was probably not responsible, but I don’t think it was irresponsible.
Sonalie Figueiras: That’s fair. I see where you’re coming from, and I appreciate the perspective. I think what’s interesting to me from what you’ve said today that I think is important is this idea that it could open people up to new formats, and the idea that you could do different things. I don’t think until today I had fully grasped that that was one of your goals. However, speaking of people who have these biases, let’s bring it back to something like Italy thinking about passing a cultivated meat ban [Editor’s Note: Italy has since voted to approve a ban]. How do you look at that when you say there’s nothing you can do about people who are not going to buy into it? What do we do when governments are not buying into it?
George Peppou: That’s a good question. I don’t think it’s going to be possible for me as a representative of the industry that’s being vilified to turn around a position on something like that. I would say, and what I have said in meetings with several representatives of different governments around the world, the train has sort of left the station on a lot of these new food technologies, that either they are in your supermarket or they’re coming very soon. If you don’t choose to be a participant in it, you’re going to suffer as a result of it. Italy could have had a cultured meat industry and still currently maintains the credibility and quality of their existing animal meat industries, it could have been additive for them, instead, it’s now something that they’re closing their door to, and companies are still going to do what they’re doing. They’re just going to do it for the Middle East or Asia or elsewhere around the world. So, in general, the EU is a fairly conservative regulatory environment, and I think countries like Italy, sticking their fingers in their ears and trying to make something go away like this is going to be more detrimental to them than it’s going to help the industry that they’re trying to defend and protect.
Sonalie Figueiras: Right, because in many ways, Italy has a very similar relationship to beef and meat than Australia, in the sense that there’s a lot of very high-quality meat and that they view it as such. However, you mentioned Asia and the Middle East and you’ve got this big launch coming up in Singapore, which I want you to share more about: why are these regions- Israel, the Middle East, Singapore, and the rest of Asia- seemingly more open to cultivated meat and these kinds of future food technologies? How do you assess that?
George Peppou: I think the main driver is coming from their food industry and their food position, certainly Singapore and many of the Middle East and at least the Emirates are net food importers, and so they are looking for ways to bring food production onshore. If you look at a country like the US, they included food technologies and food bio-manufacturing as part of their national priorities because they’re viewing it through the lens of food sovereignty, and asking: how do you make sure that you’re producing enough protein and enough food to feed your entire population? I think that’s generally the main driver coming from governments, that regulatory acceptance and that regulatory science communication that’s coming from those food regulators lays the groundwork for companies to come in and actually market some of these products. However, I do think it starts there, it has to start with that commitment from governments, as this is something which is going to be an important part of our food system, and we’re going to make sure that when it does land on your plate, it’s extremely safe.
Sonalie Figueiras: So following up on that, Singapore has a very special role to play in this industry, it is the first country in the world to have given regulatory approval for cultivated meat. It’s the only country in the world where you can purchase some cultivated meat and taste it as a consumer [Editor’s Note: since recording the episode, two US companies got USDA regulatory approval]. What’s your relationship like with Singapore, and can you share more about the launch plans that have been written about?
George Peppou: Yeah, absolutely. So, Singapore took a position of regulatory leadership very early on, as part of their 30 by 30 plan of bringing 30% of food production onshore. We talk to the folks at the Singapore food agency multiple times a week usually, and they’ve been assessing our application for quite a few months, they’ve seen lots of additional data, and I will be spending some time with them in person later this week to go through top-to-tail specification. So, we’ve had a very open and collaborative relationship with them.
Similarly, with the Australian regulator and other regulators that we’re working with, they’ve always been very clear about why this is a policy priority for them, and what it is that matters most to them around safety and how we assure safety. So, it’s been a very positive experience.
With launching in Singapore, as soon as we get the thumbs up from the regulator, we are ready to roll. So, it’s simply a matter of when we get that approval letter. Hopefully, within less than 24 hours, we’ll be having that first launch event – the first time that people can purchase a cultured meat product that we’ve produced, assuming that adheres to the final specifications.
The way we’re thinking about the launch is it’s a cultured quail product, and it’s really about finding those true fans, finding the people that are really engaged, and I’ve been on that journey with us, bringing them together, and learning as much as we possibly can about what they love about it, and how they talk about it. The first few months for us are going to be about learning from consumers and learning from customers before we go and try to scale out to heaps of different restaurants and food service. So, there’ll be lots of small, intimate pop-ups all over the city, which will give you a chance to taste.
Sonalie Figueiras: You are launching with restaurant partners, right? This is not going to be a retail product that customers can take home?
George Peppou: It’s going to be food service only.
Sonalie Figueiras: Okay.
George Peppou: It’s gonna be a food service-only product to begin with, and that was a very intentional choice around: How do you make sure people’s first contacts and first experiences are as positive as possible, especially when there is a product that has some assumed knowledge around how you cook it? How do you have a great experience? Again, this is something that Impossible did really well early on – Their first version was very finicky, but they started with high-end chefs who could give a great experience. So, it’ll be food service only to begin with, we may do a couple of little drops of retail as well to sort of experiment and learn about how people are cooking and consuming in their own home.
However, the goal for us over the first few months is to just learn, learn, learn! It’s all about learning for us in Singapore and making sure that by the time we’re shifting our attention to a market like Australia or the US, we have a product that you can walk into a bunch of different restaurants and buy and enjoy across Singapore, and maybe even moving into a little bit of retail as well, at least at the high end. So, first up, it’s going to be those pop-ups all over the city, and it’s going to be a matter of following us to see where they land.
Sonalie Figueiras: Can you give a few more details around format and timeline, like do you have an idea? Are you generally getting any nods from the regulator? Is it this year?
George Peppou: I definitely have an idea. I definitely can’t publicly say just yet [laughter], but ‘keep an eye on our socials’ is the main thing I’ll say.
Sonalie Figueiras: [laughter] What about the format? Are you sharing anything about your products’ format? You’ve said it’s a cultured quail? Is this going to be a piece on its own?
George Peppou: We have a few different formats, and we’ve always tested out a really wide range of different formats. So, it will likely be, at least in the early days, multiple formats in a single meal. So, again, our goal is to learn as much as possible. So, you may see multiple different formats, and you may see one format, but I can’t say too much on that either at this stage, I want to keep that a little bit of a surprise.
Sonalie Figueiras: Fair enough. Do you feel that you are where you want to be, timeline-wise? You raised almost $50 million last year, the biggest series A of the industry. I assume you’ve got full bank accounts. It seems like a very exciting timeline for regulatory approval in Singapore. Is this where you plan to be?
George Peppou: I always want things to move faster. I would love to have been selling at the end of last year. Plausibly, it would have been the earliest we could have been ready, but I’m relentlessly impatient with timelines. So, nothing’s ever quick enough, nothing’s ever soon enough for me. We’re in a very healthy position, I still would love to spend more time on the market, so we can spend more time with customers. That way, the better the products are going to be, the better the positioning will become. So, I sort of want to be able to use every single possible moment. I’m just desperate to be on the market, really!
Sonalie Figueiras: [laughter] I’m gonna close it out with – What does success look like to you? And do you think about things like legacy?
George Peppou: I definitely don’t think about legacy. What excites me, and what’s always excited me about Vow is, I think we have a chance to really shape and change our food system. We have a chance to take an experiment with meat in a way that no one else has been able to, and that’s always been the thing which excites and inspires me, and do so in a way which creates positive benefits. I think Vow will be successful, if we either directly, or through inspiring the direction of others, are able to shift at least a single-digit percentage of meat consumption away from animals to something else, you know. If some other company takes what we’re doing, runs with it and executes it, I’ll still feel very successful and very proud that we were able to influence the direction of the global food system. I think that, for me, is success. I don’t pay much attention to what my role is in that, as long as it happens.
Sonalie Figueiras: Are you sitting there going: “Oh, in five years, I need to have an IPO, or in 10 years, we need to have our products on 1000 supermarket shelves!” Is there a concrete goal for you, a timeline goal, or just this general kind of momentum towards changing how we produce food, and how we think about the way we produce food?
George Peppou: It’s very much about general momentum. That’s really what I personally thrive on, and I really,…I was going to say, “I guess I really do clamour for,” but I am always looking for that sense of momentum and progress, and if it’s Vow that’s driving that momentum and that change in the food system, I’ll be very happy. If we inspire others to change and have momentum in the food system, I will also be very happy. As long as the change happens, which I believe it has to…if we can make that happen a little bit sooner, I’ll be very proud of that.
Sonalie Figueiras: Okay, one last bonus question, then I’m gonna let you go: What keeps you up at night?
George Peppou: Oh, that’s a great question. I’ve been sleeping very well this past week [laughter]. I think the thing which makes me the most nervous, and sort of plays on my mind the most is, we hire the most ludicrously talented people, and it’s like, how do I keep them engaged, excited, and give them the right amount of structure and direction for them to be successful. So, the stuff that is usually keeping me up at night is when there are great people on the team who I feel like I’m letting down or not letting them achieve their potential. Much more so than anything else. We can solve technical problems, we can manage regulatory problems, I’m very confident at this point on safety, given how much extensive safety testing we’ve done. So, it’s definitely not something that’s on my mind at all anymore. Everything else feels like it’s solvable, as long as we have really great people that are really engaged and excited about doing the work and solving some really hard problems. When I feel like I’m not enabling that, that’s definitely the thing which keeps me up.
Sonalie Figueiras: Thank you so much, George. It’s been a fantastic conversation! I really appreciate you coming on the show, and I have no doubt it will inspire many.
George Peppou: Thank you so much for having me. It was a lot of fun!
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.
It has been in the making for a while, but Italy has officially passed the law that bans the production and sale of cultivated meat within the country, with the far-right government citing health reasons, a risk to the country’s tradition, and a need to safeguard the livestock industry. The move also bans the use of meat-related terms such as ‘steak’ and ‘salami’ on plant-based meat product labelling.
Italy’s lower house of parliament has approved a bill by its agriculture minister to ban the sale and production of cultivated meat in the country, making it the first to do so. The law, which includes a plant-based meat labelling ban, has introduced fines between €10,000 and €60,000 for each violation.
The law described non-traditional foods like cultivated meat and insect protein as a threat to Italy’s food culture. This has been a familiar rhetoric ever since Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her far-right Brothers of Italy party gained power in the centre last year, and the latest move has already attracted controversy from multiple corners across Europe.
Agriculture minister Francesco Lollobrigida – who is Meloni’s brother-in-law – called the ban a “brave measure demanded by citizens . . . that puts Italy at the vanguard of the world”. In a Facebook post, he said: “We are the first nation to ban it, with all due respect to the multinationals who hope to make monstrous profits by putting citizens’ jobs and health at risk.”
Lollobrigada brandished two members of the left-wing Più Europa party – who were protesting in front of the parliament with signs like “cultivating ignorance” and shouting “shame, shame” – as “clowns”. Italy’s opposition has criticised the move as “ideological propaganda”.
Industry body the Italian Alliance for Complementary Proteins said this bill “tells Italians what they can and can’t eat, stifles innovation and likely violates EU law”. Italy may not be able to impose the ban on the sale of cultivated meat produced within the EU, as its common single market enables the free movement of goods and services.
How Italy’s cultivated meat ban took shape
Courtesy: Eat Just
There was noise about a potential ban as early as last year, when one of Italy’s largest farming associations, Coldiretti, launched a petition for a prohibition of “synthetically produced food”, which included “laboratory-produced meat to milk ‘without cows’ to fish without seas, lakes and rivers”. It attacked the use of fetal bovine serum – something more and more producers are moving away from – in the production of cell-cultured meat, calling it unnatural.
The petition bagged nearly half a million signatures, as well as the support of 3,000 local and regional governments. Then, in March, Italy’s senate approved a bill to put the ban into effect, with 60% of senators voting in favour and citing national heritage and human health concerns.
Italy submitted a Technical Regulations Information System (TRIS) notification to the EU – a procedure aiming to prevent the creation of barriers between EU countries. This meant that the country needed approval from the bloc if it wanted to ban cultivated meat, with other EU members getting the chance to weigh in on the decision as well.
Last month, however, Italy withdrew this notification, as it knew that the proposal would be rejected by the EU. Claudio Pomo, development manager at animal rights group Essere Animali, noted at the time: “What happened is certainly an important result, but it is not yet a definitive victory, and we must not let our guard down. Minister Lollobrigida has already said that he wants to move forward with this battle, and there will certainly be other moves.”
And there certainly have been. Just last week, Lollobrigada doubled down on this stance, confirming the country wants to be the first to ban cultivated meat. Speaking to Politico after the bill was passed, he said: “If you produce a food that has no relationship to man, land, work, you can move production to a place with lower taxes and less environmental standards, hurting jobs and the environment.”
The ban also prohibits plant-based companies from using words like ‘steak’, ‘salami’ on vegan meat alternatives, which alt-protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe says are consumed by half of Italy’s population. The country boasts the third-largest plant-based market in the EU, with a 21% sales hike from 2020-22.
“Eliminating the possibility of using familiar terms to facilitate product recognition undermines transparency, generating confusion for consumers where none currently exists, as demonstrated by surveys,” said GFI Europe’s public affairs consultant, Francesca Gallelli.
Misinformation about health risks
Courtesy: Upside Foods
Lollobrigada reiterated the government’s intention to “defend our civilization against a model driven by delocalisation and long supply chains”. This is despite Italy having a self-sufficiency rate of 42.5% for beef.
This anti-global stance was taken up by Coldiretti too, which had called on farmers to “stop a dangerous deviation that endangers healthy eating and the future of Made in Italy food”. Its president Ettore Prandini wrote on social media: “We are proud to be the first country that … blocks, as a precaution, the sale of food produced in laboratories whose effects on the health of consumer citizens are currently unknown.”
According to the Financial Times, Italy’s livestock industry sold €6.3B and €8.4B worth of beef and pork products last year, respectively, as per data by agribusiness support agency ISMEA. Red meats like these have been linked to various health risks, including cancer and cardiovascular disease – one of the leading causes of death in the country.
Cultivated meat is still in its infancy, and it’s regulated under strict conditions in the EU, where it’s classified as a novel food and requires pre-market authorisation to be approved for sale. So far, no country has applied for clearance in the region (only Singapore and the US have approved sales). But any cultivated meat that satisfies the EU’s requirements will be safe for human consumption – as that’s the first criterion listed in the legislation.
Additionally, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization have both played down safety concerns about cultured meat regarding 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 alleviated in a joint report by the two bodies.
Chiara Nitride, a food processing tech researcher at Naples’ University Federico II, has said: “From a nutritional point of view, cultivated meat could be more suitable to substitute conventional meat in our diets than plant-based alternatives.” She added that these proteins could actually be safer than their conventional counterparts, as it eliminates the need for antibiotics.
So concerns about ‘unknown health effects’ are unfounded, especially since consumers in Singapore and the US have been eating these products. Additionally, a 525-person survey in 2019 found that 54% of Italians are willing to try cultivated meat – that was four years ago before attitudes towards food and sustainability evolved further and concerns about meat and food safety became more prominent post-pandemic.
GFI Europe has criticised the messaging around health concerns. “The debate surrounding cultivated meat in Italy has been fueled by misinformation, as hearings in the senate intentionally excluded cultivated meat companies and supporters while allowing false claims from opponents of this sustainable food,” said Gallelli.
She had previously said noted that the alt-protein sector will create tens of thousands of jobs and offer farmers the opportunities to diversify 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.”
A violation of EU law?
Courtesy: Omeat
Prandini told Politico: “Italy, which is the world leader in food quality and safety, has the duty to lead the way in policies to protect citizens’ health”, adding that “the battle now moves to Europe”.
The International Organization for Animal Protection, an Italy animal advocacy group, called the ban “completely useless today”, as cultivated meat hasn’t been approved for human consumption in the EU and therefore cannot be marketed”. It added that if it is approved, Italy will not be able to prohibit it.
This was echoed by Stefano Lattanzi, CEO of Italian cultivated meat consortium Bruno Cell, who told TIME that “this frontal attack from the government” makes no sense: “We are working on solutions for a climate-changed future.”
The EU itself has expressed support for alt-protein and sustainable food production: its Parliament’s Agriculture Committee has voted to implement a strategy to increase the production of plant proteins. And just last month, it voted in favour of the Plant Protein Strategy, calling on member states to boost the production and consumption of sustainable protein crops (though it did defend the role of animal proteins in diets and ecosystems too).
Lollobrigida told Politico he doesn’t expect any issues from the EU’s side when it comes to the ban, explaining that the bloc “holds the principle that the identity of peoples must be preserved”.
But industry association Cellular Agriculture Europe called the ban unlawful with “no legal merit”, and one that “goes against Italian consumers’ free choice”. “To enter the EU market, novel food products like cultivated meat must be authorised by the European Commission and the member states, after a thorough safety assessment by the European Food Safety Authority. There is no legal reason for Italy to pre-empt this risk assessment and risk management process,” it said in a statement.
“The EU law also provides that technical regulations like this law must be notified to the European Commission before their actual adoption, allowing other member states and stakeholders to provide comments on potential barriers to the EU internal market. The Italian authorities’ withdrawal of their notification and today’s vote blatantly contravene the EU law.”
Speaking about the ban, Cellular Agriculture Europe president Robert E Jones told Green Queen last month: “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.”
In a social media post about the ban yesterday, Jones wrote “We’ve known it was coming for months, but that doesn’t make it less silly, short-sighted, or in breach of EU law.” He added: “If you are Italian, please sign this petition and join the movement to overturn this nonsense.
Italy’s ban comes the same week a Republican legislator in Florida introduced a bill to ban cell-cultured meat in the state. Meanwhile, the senate in Romania has voted to prohibit the sale of cultivated meat as well, which will need approval from the Chamber of Deputies – as has been done in Italy.
The Italian Alliance for Complementary Proteins added: “Once famous for world-changing innovations such as microchips and groundbreaking fashions, Italian politicians are now choosing to go backwards while the world moves forward.”
A Republican legislator in Florida has introduced a bill proposing to ban the production, sale and distribution of cell-cultured meat in the state. If signed into law, this would come into effect in July 2024.
On Monday, Florida House Republican Tyler Sirois proposed a new bill that would impede the regulatory progress made by cultivated meat in the US. The proposed legislation (HB 435) seeks to ban the production, sale, holding and distribution of cell-cultured meat within the state, imposing criminal penalties on anyone violating these rules.
The bill, which would come into effect in July 2024 if signed into law, would be in contrast to the position taken up by other states and the central administration. In June, the US Department of Agriculture granted clearance for the production and sale of cultivated chicken to Californian companies Upside Foods and Eat JUST, making the US only the second country to approve cultured meat after Singapore did so in late 2020.
Florida’s bill threatens to halt these advancements in the US, which has by far the highest number of publicly announced companies working in this space (43) and commands 60% of global cultured meat investments.
Florida’s proposed cultivated meat ban
Eat JUST’s GOOD Meat at China Chilcano | Courtesy: Ana Isabel Martinez Chamorro
Sirois’ bill lays out a list of penalties for those who fail to comply with the proposed ban. Deeming it unlawful to make or sell cultured meat in the state, any person violating this would face a misdemeanour of the second degree, alongside a fine between $500 to $1,000. Meanwhile, any food establishment doing so would be subject to disciplinary action. The license of any restaurant, store, or other business in violation could be suspended or issued an immediate stop-sale order.
The bill also authorises the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services to adopt additional specific rules governing the use of cultured meat in the state. This means anyone looking to obtain regulatory approval for cultivated meat in Florida would require authorisation from the department.
Apart from its animal welfare credentials, cultured meat is much more environmentally friendly than conventional meat, which accounts for 60% of food emissions globally. Animal agriculture, meanwhile contributes between 11-19.5% of all emissions.
A life-cycle assessment (LCA) published earlier this year found that cultivated meat is three times more adept at turning crops into meat than even the “most efficient” livestock (significantly reducing its land use), while the lack of manure means its nitrogen emissions are lower too. A similar LCA by alt-protein industry think tank the Good Food Institute in 2021 revealed that cell-based meat produced via renewable energy can have a 92% lower impact on global heating, requires 95% less land, and uses 78% less water compared to conventionally farmed beef.
But Florida’s proposed bill spotlights the larger disconnect between meat and climate change in the US – a Washington Post and University of Maryland poll in July revealed that 74% of Americans don’t believe eating meat has any impact on climate change. Meanwhile, Sirois’ proposal reflects many leading Republicans’ stance on climate change – in one primary debate, the party’s presidential candidates refused to connect human activity to the ecological crisis, with one actually calling it a hoax.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis – formerly seen as one of the major challengers to former president Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination but losing traction of late – deflected the question after saying: “Let’s have this debate. We’re not schoolchildren.”
Policy support for cultured meat in the US
Chef Dominique Crenn served the first USDA-approved cultivated chicken in the US at Bar Crenn | Courtesy: Upside Foods
While some are suggesting that cultivated meat isn’t for sale anywhere in the US, both Eat JUST’s GOOD Meat and Upside Foods are selling their cell-cultured chicken at upscale restaurants, the former at China Chilcano in Washington, DC and the latter at Bar Crenn in San Francisco, California.
In fact, California has been at the forefront of legislative cultured meat support. In July 2022, it became the first US state to invest in research for these foods, allocating $5M of the state budget for alt-protein research.
The national government has also thrown its weight behind the sector. The Biden administration released an executive order in September 2022, directing agencies to create reports on the biotech sector, which included one from the USDA on “cultivating alternative food sources”. This was followed by the earmarking of $6M to USDA’s Agricultural Research Service for alt-protein R&D.
A year before this, the US government made its largest public funding package for alt-protein through a $10M NIFA grant, which formed the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture in Massachusetts.
There’s still a long way to go, however. Last year, the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was signed into law by Joe Biden, billed as the most ambitious climate act passed in the country. It earmarked $369B for clean energy, but just over 5% of the money is set aside for changing farming practices, which account for 11% of the US’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Moreover, this spending overlooks meat and dairy production, as well as food waste. The ‘climate-smart’ agricultural practices the IRA seeks to promote won’t actually reduce emissions all that significantly. This disproportionate funding is reflective of the global climate finance gap – only 4.3% of all climate investments go to agrifood systems, which make up a third of all GHG emissions.
Other countries looking to ban cultivated meat
Courtesy: Mosa Meat
Nevertheless, Florida’s proposed ban on cultivated meat undoes a lot of the good work done to progress this sector in the US. More internationally, Italy has been making headlines this year with its own proposed ban on cultured meat to protect its food heritage. The country withdrew its notification for the bill to the EU last month, but only as it expected a rejection. Its agricultural minister has since confirmed that the government is looking to press ahead with the bill.
Similarly, the Romanian Senate has reportedly voted to prohibit the sale of cultivated meat too, which is pending approval from the Chamber of Deputies, which has the final say. Violations would mean a fine between €40,000-60,000.
“This proposal threatens to cut Romania off from investment and job opportunities, undermine efforts to tackle climate change and restrict consumer choice,” GFI Europe’s policy manager Seth Roberts told Romania-Insider. “It would also leave Romania behind as countries around the world invest in cultivated meat as part of a future-proof food system.”
On Italy’s proposed ban, Robert E Jones, president of the industry association Cellular Agriculture Europe, told Green Queen: “As such a move will be a blatant violation of EU law, it is yet another sign that this is all political theatre to fulfill 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.”
The below conversation is the transcript of the second episode of the podcast miniseries Green Queen in Conversation: Cultivated Meat Pioneers featuring Didier Toubia, founder and CEO of Aleph Farms, interviewed by show host Sonalie Figueiras. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
In the second episode of Green Queen in Conversation – Cultivated Meat Pioneers, Sonalie Figueiras talks to Didier Toubia, co-founder and CEO of Aleph Farms, a cultivated meat company based in Israel. Didier cuts a unique figure in the space- the conversation was a real eye-opener about his background and how he started working with food and development agencies in Africa and how that informed his worldview about food systems, equity and food justice, and how in turn that led to starting a cultivated meat company specialised in beef steak, which he believes will help right the wrongs inherent in our food systems.
He is so passionate about ensuring access to safe, traceable, and nutritious food for everyone, and not just for those of us in the wealthier countries. So, I think our conversation is quite different from the other interviews in this series. I found it really inspiring, particularly, as Didier has had many careers in his life, from food and development, to biotech, to deep tech. I’m sure you’ll find our chat fascinating too.
Sonalie Figueiras: Hi Didier, it’s great to have you here. Welcome to the podcast.
Didier Toubia: Hey, Sonalie. Good to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Sonalie Figueiras: Yeah, I think you are a key part of the global cultivated meat story, and I want to explore the Aleph journey. So, my first question is: how did your cultivated meat experience begin? When did you first discover cultivated meat, and how did you end up with one of the first companies in the space?
Didier Toubia: I think the origins of my interest in cultivated meat goes back probably 25 years when I studied food engineering and biology in France at the time, and when I studied my major and full Master’s Degree in the south of France, getting deeper into food technologies for the developing world. I started my career in the Ivory Coast in Western Africa with the IFC, a branch of the World Bank. My goal was really to tackle the inherent issues of the food system, especially malnutrition, and food security issues, whilst studying in Africa, and I realized relatively quickly that those challenges can’t be addressed by targeted action, and totally systemic issues of hunger, allocation of resources, and issues associated with the distribution of resources – we can take care of and solve with more focused initiatives, rather than with (targeted) actions.
When I came back to France, 20-25 years later, my main motivation was to address those systemic issues with the food system, the roots of the reasons why we have those issues, both in terms of sustainability, food security, public health, not just in Africa, but on the global level. Actually, a lot of the issues I saw at the time, and the issues we see in Africa today, on the global level, are very much overlapping. So, it really kind of closed the loop for me and connected a lot of the dots with my early experience in the food system, but also with my overall 10 years of experience in the biomedical industry, following me going to Israel. Aleph Farms is at the crossroads between the biomedical world and the food system.
Courtesy: Aleph Farms
Sonalie Figueiras: So, that’s interesting anddifferent than a lot of the other founders in the space. So, not so much the climate connection: for you, it’s the food security and the nutrition piece of the puzzle, but at the same point in time, it’s interesting, because when people think of going to Africa and dealing with systemic issues around malnutrition, they wouldn’t immediately associate cultivated meat in bioreactors as a solution to the problems that African nations can face. How do you bridge the two there? I mean, cultivated meat is an expensive and deep technology that still requires decades of work before we can scale it to a mass level.
Didier Toubia: It’s through the long-term play. I would argue that the food system [as it works today] is not actually intended to feed the people. During the industrialization of our food system in the 50s and 60s, the focus has been on efficiencies and output, how to produce more food at a lower cost, and large industrial companies developing and making more profit. I think the fact that today, we’re throwing away close to 30% of our food, while close to 900 million people don’t have enough food is a testimonial that the current food system is not designed to bring the right amount of nutrition to the right people at the right time and in the right place. And I think cultivated meat can help decentralize food production.
One of the big issues with our food system today, beyond the focus on profit, is that it’s super concentrated. Historically, we used to rely on 6-7,000 different sources of food. Today, I believe that five different species and eight different crops make up over 70% of the food we consume globally, and the system is not just concentrated in a few species, it’s also concentrated in specific areas of the world. If we’re talking about beef, for instance, it’s primarily in North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and a little bit in Europe, and a lot of countries are importing beef, for instance, in Israel (where Aleph was founded), we import 88% of all beef. It’s a shared challenge with all the countries in the Middle East, and we see the same pattern in many parts of Asia, including Singapore, where they import technically 100% of all beef, and cultivated meat can help decentralize the production of food because we can grow [meat from] cells.
I’ll explain in a little bit what we do, and how that fits into our vision – That we can grow cells in a closed system independently to the climate or the local availability of land and water, meaning that we can distribute the production of high-quality animal nutrition, both empowering local communities and diversifying the supply, and substituting for part of the inputs. However, it also involves making sure that we make the food system more resilient by diversifying the supply of animal protein and fats. We build circuit breakers and meat plants, and we make the system more resilient to shocks. So, we do see cellular agriculture as a cornerstone of a more secure and resilient food system, and regarding your comment about the cost of cultivated meat, it’s clear that it’s a long play, and I think that cultivated meat is probably similar to solar panels which were extremely expensive 20 years ago, and now, 20 years later, the production cost has come down as the economies of scale started to play, and production processes and product technologies have improved.
We believe that for the next few years cultivated meat will be more confined in the developed world, but [we are] developing a long-term strategy for the Global South, and that’s one of the projects we’ve done with water recently in the US, for instance- I’m actually planning to travel to Ethiopia in the next couple of months to further explore the possibilities. We believe that in Africa where today there is strong pressure to intensify cattle farming (Africa is similar to India in that the sector mostly relies on smallholder farms) to make the system supposedly more resilient and more efficient.
We all know that industrial agriculture is not a good solution, we’re pushing back from intensive agriculture in the developed world to regenerative eggs and organic food. So, I think cultivating cells might be a way to skip this intermediate phase of animal farming industrialization, and to keep the smallholder farms as they are and supply them directly with the growing cells, a little bit like how some countries have skipped the phase of landline phones, for instance, and in some parts of India and China, bringing cells to the global South can help them move directly to cellular agriculture and skip this intermediate phase of intensive industrial animal farming, which is bad for everyone, same as how these countries and regions went directly to cellular phones and skipped the landline intermediate step.
Sonalie Figueiras: I love the vision. I do have to ask, why beef then? You know, why not chicken? Beef is currently one of the most, if not, the most expensive meat in the world. It has a status as something very elite and associated with wealth and higher status. Why start with steak, not even ground beef, the ultimate luxury food?
Didier Toubia: That’s an important question. Our product strategy with implementation at Aleph Farms is, on the one hand, high impact, and on the other, high-value products. I want to explain why beef fits into our roadmap.
First, we believe that the biggest contribution to cultivated meat will be where we have real challenges with animal protein and fat production. If we’re talking about the concentration of the food system, cattle farming is the most concentrated of all the animal production practices. Beyond that, it’s also the biggest impact on climate- livestock production is responsible for about 15% of global emissions, while the environmental impact of chicken is much lower. When we’re talking about the use of land and water, which are also critical parameters as we have been causing land diversion- in the last 50 years we lost 30% of all arable land since the Second World War, and 42% of the crops we harvest every year in the world are intended for animal feed, primarily cattle and cows, and the intensive monoculture of soya and maize is one of the primary drivers of deforestation and the loss of soil quality. The amount of water required to make one kilogram of beef varies between 1,500-10,000 litres, depending on the farming practices, and we might have 40% less freshwater in the next few decades. So, there are some real issues associated with beef production which we don’t see with the other animal meat species today.
Growing cells using renewable energies we’re able to reduce the environmental impact [of beef production] by 92%, in terms of the greenhouse gasses emitted. We can also reduce the amount of land by 95%, and the amount of water by 78%. When we’re talking about cultivated beef, I think it would be difficult to [have similar] benefits for cultivated chicken as long as [we are looking at] climate and environmental parameters. So, this is one.
Second, as we said before, cultivated needs will be relatively expensive. I talked about solar panels, but we can also talk about electric vehicles as an analogy. Innovation is expensive today, and I think there is an inherent conflict within the world of food tech. Tech is associated with innovation and is expensive, and food is a commodity. It should be at a low price, and not like biomedical products or high-margin products. So, we wanted to get into the market and drive initial acceptance to rely on products where we can bring value so that we can reach prosperity quicker, and build a sustainable business model over the long term.
When you’re talking about prosperity, it’s not an absolute value, it’s relative, it’s relative to the equivalent product produced with the conventional egg. When we’re talking about this tech price point, which is maybe 10 times higher than GM chicken, it’s easier to get to the same price point as our cost curve is driven down, than to get to the price point of GM chicken, which makes the whole business model more sustainable and enables us to drive more impact over time.
So, the focus on beef is driven by two decisions: One, to focus on new products where we can really bring benefits and document real environmental impact, and second, based on higher value and higher margins which can drive us to be sustainable as a company earlier. As we drive the cost down and progressively move toward the mainstream, we’ll probably make a cultivated chicken and a cultivated pork down the road. However, it will take a few years.
Courtesy: Aleph Farms
Sonalie Figueiras: So even though it might seem counterintuitive, it makes the most sense to attack the beef problem, because of its climate footprint, and it makes the most sense to go with steak because it allows for early adopters to get involved, and for you to become financially viable. This is very much the Tesla Model in many ways, right?
Didier Toubia: Yes, I think it’s been the whole idea with Tesla, that it has been able to drive this transition towards electric vehicles because they weren’t the first to make electric cars. In the 70s, there were early electric cars in the US, but they were the first to crack the code of the right product strategy. If we talk about Tesla, it’s not just starting high-end and then moving to the mass market that drives the cost down, which as we just discussed is what we’re doing, but it is also about differentiating the products versus internal combustion engine cars. We’re not trying to copy existing cuts of beef one-for-one. We’re not trying to be an exact duplication of tenderloin or ribeye, but rather developing our own set of attributes and our value proposition, and differentiate ourselves versus conventional meat, so that our products can be successful based on what they are, and not as a copy of anything, which is not a good marketing strategy.
Sonalie Figueiras: Okay. I want to get into your product strategy in a second, but since we’ve been talking about your vision and how you started, I want to ask you: You’ve been doing this for a few years now. Has the industry progressed enough, and do you timeline-wise feel you are where you want to be where you thought you were gonna be?
Didier Toubia: I’ll start with the second question. When we raised our A round in 2019, and we built a business plan back in 2018, so five years ago, we said that we would be in the market by the end of 2022. We’re currently on track for launching Q4 this year. So, we’re probably six to nine months late from our initial plan. I think for a certain type of innovative product, and given the delivery uncertainties we had at the time, we had to invent everything from scratch. I think that this six to nine-month delay within these five years is okay, not bad. So, in terms of timelines, we won’t be that far off and overall, you know, [we are] making good progress according to our plans.
Sonalie Figueiras: That’s pretty good, pretty much on track!
Didier Toubia: I think it is. I think we’re well on track. Plus or minus, you know, 20%, which is kind of the range of the order of magnitude of uncertainty, but overall, we’re on track. I think the industry as a whole has made a lot of progress. When we started, cultivated meat was completely theoretical. It sounded like science fiction. I think that four or five companies in this space, including Aleph Farms, have already developed scalable processes, have done a lot of work on cost reduction, and have already built facilities where they can make cultivated meet at the commercial level and comply with all the regulatory requirements. So, I think that when we’re looking five years back, we can appreciate the progress that has been made, which is phenomenal. I’m not saying that we have solved all the issues or that everything is perfect- there’s still work ahead of us to continue to scale up, meet consumer expectations and move toward the mainstream. However, I think on the technology side, the scientific side, in terms of process development, early industrialization and regulatory compliance, we have made a huge leapfrog, and I’m quite happy to see that. The industry is really on the verge of going to market and starting initial acceptance.
Sonalie Figueiras: That’s good to hear. I’m certainly very optimistic, but I want to ask some follow-up questions. One is about timeline constraints around regulatory approval. Currently, that’s only happened for Eat Just in Singapore for two of their chicken products [Editor’s Note: This interview was recorded before Eat Just and Upside Foods were granted US regulatory approval by the USDA in June 2023]. So, I want to understand, you say you plan to launch in Q4, is that going to be in Singapore? And how confident are you on the regulatory approval side? What about regulatory approval in your home country of Israel?
Didier Toubia: Yes, Aleph Farms decided to focus on the Middle East and Asia first. For the same reasons of food security I mentioned before, I think that there is more need for cultivated meats in those geographies, and that’s where you want to address real issues and have a real impact, so we filed regulatory applications in both Israel and Singapore last year. I can’t share the exact details of where we stand right now, but we believe that we have reasonable chances, and we can be cleared in one of those countries at least in the next few months, and launch after the summer.
We do believe that Asia will be an important market for us moving forward. When we’re looking at, let’s say 10 years ahead, most of the population of the world is based in Asia, and the increase and growth in meat consumption really relies on Asia, while the consumers are also very open to novel foods, and the public-private partnership we’re talking about is working very well. I think that there’s a lot of alignment between the different stakeholders in the animal protein and fat industry in many Asian regions, as well as in the Middle East, to push innovation and new production systems, which can help in getting more food sovereignty. In Europe and the US, I think that there is a strong political will to drive innovation.
In my view, we do see, especially in the last six to nine months, as cultivated meat is getting closer to the market, and more interest associated with the conventional agriculture lobbies, which are trying to delay the launch of cultivated meat, that the internal alignment between all the stakeholders in Europe and the US will take more time, just because traditionally, those geographies are very strong in commercial agriculture, and a lot of farmers don’t yet understand exactly what we do, and feel that cultivated meat could be a threat, which we don’t see in Asia, nor the Middle East of course, because cattle production is very limited.
Sonalie Figueiras: And they don’t have land or enough water…
Didier Toubia: Exactly, exactly. We overlook the importance of land on our planet.
Sonalie Figueiras: Absolutely. I mean, since you brought it up, this pushback that we’re seeing in Western markets, especially in North America and Europe, where there are strong beef farmer identities associated with national cultures- let’s dive into this narrative coming up in the media and across social media that cultivated meat is some kind of “franken-food”, that “it’s too tech”, and “it’s not real food.” For some people, there seems to be a bias against it. I want to ask you: What do you think about consumer perception, and what do you think the average person is getting wrong about the science of cultivated meat?
Didier Toubia: I think that’s a big question and I would like to give three answers. The first one is more related to conventional agriculture and why there is a misperception around cultivated meat, and maybe on the consumer side as well:
First, we do see cells and cellular agriculture as a third pillar of animal-based agriculture. Same as when we started eating meat thousands of years ago, and meat became widespread 600,000-700,000 years ago when we started cooking meat. And then, many years afterwards when we domesticated animals, we were able to milk cows, goats and sheep, and to drink milk and eat dairy products, which was a completely new source of animal-based products at the time- we were the only species drinking the milk of another species. So, drinking milk was very weird when we started, but today, it’s a normalised part of the food culture.
We do see a third source of animal-based products, which is cells. Same as milk, which was introduced to the diet a long time ago, 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, we’re witnessing today, a third source of food, which is, not exactly meat, it probably has more similarities with milk than with meat, and those cells have the benefit of providing an additional source and additional choice for animal-based products, which can relieve a little bit of the pressure on conventional agriculture for raising farming whole animals. We’ve technically passed the maximum scale, which makes sense in terms of farming whole animals because we have too many costs today [in animal agriculture], and the impact is huge.
Now, if we can introduce cells into the food system, which do not require the farming of whole animals, we can reduce the number of animals and better manage them in the framework of regenerative ag and sustainable farming practices and still complement them with an additional source of animal-based products to make sure that we have more choices, and ensure that we can still meet the increasing demand for animal proteins and fats? This is how we look at [the opportunity for] cells. We call it cellular agriculture because we believe that similarly to how meat has been incorporated into the agricultural ecosystem, the same can be done with cells. So, we do see cells as an opportunity for agriculture, as an additional revenue stream and an additional practice which can complement sustainably-produced meat and dairy.
Sonalie Figueiras: So you’re saying that eventually, you’re imagining a system where meat cattle farmers can make money by selling cells to cultivated meat companies?
Didier Toubia: Yes. They [the farmers] have to make money with the cells, of course. If we don’t find the right business model, it won’t work. Actually at Aleph Farms last year, we started a global research project with the Federation University in Australia to develop different business models for incorporating cells into common conventional farms in different parts of the world, because the business structure of farmers and their farming practices tends to vary a lot between different geographies, like in India, the US, Europe- they all work differently. We need to find a way to incorporate cells into agriculture, it will not work otherwise, that’s for sure.
I think there’s sometimes a misperception that cultivated beef is a threat to agriculture. We see it as a solution for an inclusive and just transition. You know, I grew up in France, and for instance, France has traditionally been the largest beef-focused country and exporter of beef in Europe. In the last few years, France became a net importer of beef, and on average, the number of [cow] heads is going down by 2.5% every year. 53% of farms are bankrupt and artificially maintained thanks to government subsidies. The average age of livestock farmers is close to 60 years old, and in less than 10 years, more than half of all these livestock farmers will have retired. So, the current system is not working as it is. So, if we can incorporate innovation and direct a part of the subsidies towards the training and investment in research and building capacities for other sources of animal-based food, we can drive an inclusive transition for the benefit of all the stakeholders. That’s a topic that lacks understanding of what cell agriculture is, which sometimes leads to some pushbacks, which is also driven by a lot of financial interests, and conventional agriculture players are benefiting from tens of billions of dollars of subsidies. So, a lot of financial interests in the current system are very strong lobbies, which are motivated by those financial interests and not by any motivation to make change, but that’s not how we can prepare for the future. So, that’s one thing.
Then, we’re talking about the consumers again, I think that if we are talking about cultivated meat, our first application of the cells is through foods like milk: we can do certain different products for milk. We can make cultivated meat from cells and a range of other products. At Aleph Farms, we publish some of the other products we make from the cells, like collagen, and we have a few other ones. So, we’re not a cultivated meat company, we’re a cellular ag company, and Aleph Cuts is only the first application of the cells.
When we’re talking about cells, there is a misperception that cells are processed food, which is not the case and I want to talk about that a little bit. What we do is instead of farming big animals like cows, we look at small animals (i.e. the cells). Cells are the building blocks of life and the building blocks of animals (i.e. the cows). We’re able to isolate the cells from a healthy animal, fully test them for safety, and nurture those cells to feed them in a controlled environment, the same as how animals are fed and nurtured in a corral or a meadow to make high-quality animal products. The cells that Aleph Farms uses are not immortalized, meaning we stick to the natural genetic material of the cells. We also follow the same processes and the same stations for cell proliferation and maturation, as in nature. So technically, we do what the animal domestication industry is doing: we replicate a natural process, and we control that environment to grant better access to high-quality nutrition with more predictability and more control. The cells are not ‘processed’. Further, we can turn the cells into a range of different products.
While I can’t say that cell-based products won’t be processed in the future, the source from which we’re using the cells by themselves is not processed. When we grow cells in the growth medium, which is the feedstock for the cells, we’re using an animal component-free growth medium, meaning we feed them without any animal input. The cells come from animals. If you think about how we make yogurt for instance, or fermented/cultured milk, we also grow cells in a medium. With yogurt, the cells are non-animal, they’re usually bacteria, whilst the growth medium is animal-based. In our case, it’s the opposite, meaning (what we do) when we cultivate ourselves, we do the same thing as when we make yoghurt, but the other way around. In our case, the growth medium is animal-free.
Sonalie Figueiras: That’s a very helpful analogy.
So technically, growing cells is a process no different than making yogurt, which is considered unprocessed food. These are some of the misperceptions that arise from many plant-based products out there, which are considered processed. So, it’s those kinds of analogies that people are making in their minds with cells and cultivated meat- they have preconceived ideas.
Aleph Cuts – Courtesy Aleph Farms
Sonalie Figueiras: People often confuse plant-based meat and cultivated meat, that’s true. Of course, that’s because all of these technologies are lumped under one umbrella. For most people, change is difficult and new technologies are complicated. However, the yogurt comparison is a very helpful analogy. Did you have a third part that you wanted to share?
Didier Toubia: Yes, I wanted to say that as we discussed before, we don’t think animal agriculture will disappear in 10 or 20 years. I know that a lot of vegan activists would like us to say that we’ll disrupt conventional agriculture, and a few plant-based companies make this type of claim, which I think is a mistake, because if we’re talking about regenerative ag, and as I’ve explained, we have a strong focus on climate and food security at Aleph Farms, we do need animals. However, we need far fewer animals, and we need to manage them better. Animals have a role in regenerating the soils and have a role in organic farming and are oftentimes associated in the countryside or in the Global South with social and economic value. As I’ve said when talking about Africa, we don’t want to replace smallholder farms, and the cows have a very important social and economic role there, especially for many, many families. We need to respect that. I think that cultivated meat as an application of sales should be complementary, and a driver for the transition to work less, cost less and be better managed. By the time we understand that, people will be looking at cultivated meat from completely different angles, not necessarily as a threat or not like those guys who are trying to replace the food, but as an additional choice for a meal, and this will open a lot of possibilities.
Sonalie Figueiras: Absolutely. Instead of an alternative, it’s an added option.
Didier Toubia: At Aleph Farms, we’re talking about complementary products, instead of alternative products. I think “alternative products” doesn’t mean anything.
Sonalie Figueiras: Yeah, I wrote a piece saying exactly that. I think we made a mistake with the name of the sector. I want to come back to what you just said about the vegan question, because as you might be aware, for some founders in this space, the vegan question is very much at the heart of what they are doing, and I see that for you, the ethical part about consuming animals is not at the heart of your mission here.
Didier Toubia: I want to expand here: I have a big issue with the industrialization of animal farming. When we grew up in France, 50 years ago, whenever people slaughtered a pig in the village, there was a ceremony. It was on the main square of the village circle, and when people went, there was a ceremony for the animal, and our relationship to the animal, and the value of the animal’s life. Honestly, I don’t have any inherent issue with eating animals, just as long as we realize that, you know, a cow has given its life to bring the steak on your plate. Today, I think there is a disconnection between meat and the life of the animal behind it. When we industrialize and individualize animal agriculture, putting animals into machines to make meat, or raise them, then slaughter them, it’s the same as when we would make cookies in the plant, meaning without any respect for the animal, that causes a lot of discomfort in me. So, regarding the point of slaughtering animals, I would say that I have an issue with the dehumanization, or let’s say ‘object possession?’ I don’t know if that’s the right term, but turning animals into objects?
Sonalie Figueiras: The exploitation of an animal.
Didier Toubia: It’s not giving respect to the animal and not valuing its life. I think it’s a big issue associated with industrialization. When you slaughter animals in a factory in a high-speed production chain, I think it’s a big issue. It’s a big ethical issue. That’s why we believe that if we can relieve the pressure on farming big animals by funding small animals like cells, we can revert and return to more extensive regenerative farming practices with higher animal welfare, and connect back to the animals as our “complementaries” [food sources] as well.
Sonalie Figueiras: It’s really interesting- you keep referring to regenerative agriculture and organic agriculture, and, you know, what we see in the media and the bigger mainstream conversation is that a lot of regenerative beef folks are very against cultivated meat. I think you’ve covered a lot of why that is, the entrenched lobby interests and the misunderstanding of the role of cellular agriculture in the industry. From where I’m sitting, reporting in this space, there does seem to be this kind of very big split between the regenerative people and then cultivated meat as a food technology, so I want to keep pushing on two things. One, I want to talk a little bit about the role of big food in your company because if we look at Aleph’s journey, you have managed to sign collaborative agreements and partnerships or retain as investors some really big names in the food industry such as BRF in Brazil, and Thai Union, and Mitsubishi. So, I want to ask you, are these partnerships that you are going out to look for? Or are these companies approaching you? How do you navigate through working with companies that are, you know, on some level upholding the status quo, which as you described yourself is problematic and not protected against the future?
Didier Toubia: Firstly, we’re only working with corporations that go through very thorough and strict due diligence by Aleph Farms on ESG parameters, and governmental, social and governance. So, we pick the corporations we work with very carefully based on the alignment of values and vision, that’s important to understand.
Secondly, we maintain our full independence. We don’t grant any rights on our IP, we don’t have any commitments to change anything, and we have no plans to accommodate any requirements from the company. None of those companies will have a seat on our board of directors, for instance. We’re working with those companies, but they don’t influence or impact the internal decision process. We remain fully independent.
Thirdly, the reason why we believe it’s important to have them involved. Just like how renewable energy today is driven primarily by the big energy companies that were traditionally oil-based. Eventually, they switched toward renewable energy and were instrumental in driving impact on the transition towards renewable energies- because, at the end of the day, they see themselves as energy companies. So, they want to develop the best solution to provide energy. I think a lot of those protein and fat companies see themselves as protein companies and are not necessarily committed to only producing meat harvested from slaughtered animals. They understand that we need to incorporate additional choices and new production systems for proteins. We want to drive real impact in the market [so] we need the big players to take hold, invest, and [help] scale these industries, same as what happened with renewable energy.
Sonalie Figueiras: So, are these companies coming to you?
Didier Toubia: It really depends. Usually they do. Actually, yes, mostly they do.
Sonalie Figueiras: So, from your side, since you said there’s strict vetting, you are getting these bigger companies coming to you wanting to learn about what you’re doing, wanting to potentially work together, wanting to participate in this new solution? Is that fair to say?
Didier Toubia: Yes. Again, we check them very carefully before we start working with them. We want to make sure they are really serious about it. The thing is a lot of those companies do understand that, you know, they can’t continue with business as usual. So, they need to incorporate, and diversify the sources of protein they’re putting into the market.
Courtesy: Aleph Farms
Sonalie Figueiras: Absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about your product launch: You recently announced cultivated petite steak, which as you said earlier, is your own format of a steak product. You’re not trying to imitate a conventional beef steak one-for-one. It’s a new label that you’re calling Aleph Cuts. You also just announced a major partnership with Chef Marcus Samuelsson, the very well-known and well-respected James Beard award-winning chef who really privileges work around diversity and takes a broader view of the food system than most. Is he part of your launch plans? I know he’s come in as an investor and an advisor, but can you talk more about how you’re working with him and about your new label?
Didier Toubia: Yeah, sure. So, the first round of products we’re launching under the Aleph Cuts brand is a series of thin-cut beef steaks, which rely on two or three cell towers from bovine origin going onto a plant-based scaffold matrix, meaning it’s a range of hybrid products – plant and animal cells. We’ve been working very hard for the last few years to make sure those products meet the requirements and the expectations of the consumers, accounting for the fact that food is not a functional product, especially meat, it’s a very emotional product, and food is an experience; especially when we talk about animal products, the emotional connection is very strong and working with chefs to develop the right taste, to give life to our products and to develop the right positioning, but also the right format to create this connection, is really important.
The reason why we selected Marcus Samuelsson-other than that he is a great guy- was because we wanted to work with a chef who could help drive initial acceptance of our products, help us with positioning it and developing the right key messages, developing the right culinary approaches, and promote our specific value proposition. So, we do see chefs as partners: we need to convey quality, but at the same time, make sure the product is not presented as a luxurious and inaccessible food. We’re very cautious not to work with a three-star Michelin chef who is disconnected from the ground. What we liked about Marcus Samuelsson is that a lot of his values are very much in line with ours in terms of care, inclusiveness, courage, and creativity. He’s very much in line with our brand [goals of] premium but accessible [food].
Sonalie Figueiras: Is he linked to your plans to visit Ethiopia? [Samuelsson is Ethiopian-born].
Didier Toubia: Yes. Again, I’m fascinated by Africa, and the thing is that, you know, New Zealand also has a lot of connections with Ethiopia and the Eastern region of Africa, which is very interesting in terms of its food scene, and its economic development as well. So, naturally, we see Ethiopia as an interesting angle for us in Africa- that’s why I’m planning to go there in the next couple of months.
Sonalie Figueiras: Do you have children?
Didier Toubia: I do.
Sonalie Figueiras: Do they know what you do? Do they understand about cultivated meat? How do they see what you do?
Didier Toubia: Of course, of course! They are quite involved in what I do, and I consult with them on many topics, and I get their input in a lot of the decision-making process.
Sonalie Figueiras: Some people say that there is a shift globally with this generation (the Gen Zs), and the Alphas coming behind them, in how they think about food, and animal agriculture, and how they are engaged with this idea that they’re living in a pretty serious climate crisis. Do you experience that? And do you think that that’s going to have an impact on our global food systems?
Didier Toubia: Yes, I do. I think that the younger generation is very knowledgeable about a lot of our global issues, and is very engaged [with them]. In my opinion, they will be the driving force behind the systemic changes we need to implement on the global level.
Sonalie Figueiras: As the founder of Aleph Farms, what does success look like to you? What do you see when you look ahead and you imagine success and your vision being realized?
Didier Toubia: I see a food system which is more diverse than today, with more choices, especially more diversity. Technically, today we have many choices, but with very little diversity. What I mean by that is that we have 100 different options of the same products, but we rely on and choose very few production processes, and the food is very concentrated. So, we have a lot of choices, but very little diversity. I would like to incorporate more diversity in the food system, especially with animal products, and to make sure that we can get back to our planetary boundaries while continuing to enjoy gratifying experiences with the food that we eat. I think it’s important because it’s not just a sustainability issue, it’s also a well-being issue. Food is part of what we are. Going back to high-quality foods, and putting the focus on emotions and experiences, is so important- [we need to get] away from ultra-processed and industrialized food products.
Sonalie Figueiras: What are the biggest challenges to get there? And what challenges are you facing at Aleph, specifically? Is it funding?
Didier Toubia: I think the biggest challenge is the amplitude of the food system. The food system is such a big industry and that is difficult to change. If we’re talking just about animal proteins, which is a subset of the food system, it’s a $1.8 trillion market, meaning that if you want to make a change in this market, it will cost you a lot of time, because of its amplitude. At Aleph Farms, we have a target for getting to $1 billion in revenues by 2030, as a way to have an impact, and typically $1 billion in revenues is exactly 0% market share of $1.8 trillion! So, if we want to have a real impact, we need to become very, very large-scale, and that requires a lot of time and a lot of collaboration with all of the stakeholders in the ecosystem. At the end of the day, to drive the change, we need all the players in the ecosystem to align their interests and work together to make the change. Of course, it will not be just one company, not even just four or five cultivated meat companies driving the change.
Sonalie Figueiras: One thing you haven’t mentioned though is government policy. How much of a role do you think that plays in this change?
Didier Toubia: I’ll go back to renewable energy, which I think is a good analogy for cellular agriculture, no different than any other technologies in the existing market that is intended to drive a systemic change in the way we manage the ecosystem. We’ve seen that for renewable energy to become mainstream took a lot of public-private partnerships and governmental support in investing and scaling up these technologies including loans and loan guarantees, tax breaks and tech agreements. Without governmental support, the renewable energy sector would never have been able to drive the cost down enough to become mainstream. It will be the same with cultivated meat. We need the support for the next 5-10 years until we can drive the costs down to become mainstream.
Sonalie Figueiras: Thanks so much, Didier. I appreciate you taking the time, and being so open and so elaborate with your answers. It’s been fascinating!
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.
CEO and co-founder of Californian hybrid meat company SciFi Foods Joshua March on alt meat price parity, why he’s all in on combining plant proteins with cultivated meat instead of conventional, and consumers’ disregard for industry terms.
This article is part of our content series exploring the world of hybrid and blended meat products – those blending cultivated or conventional proteins with plant-based ingredients, respectively, and why some think this is the future of reducing meat consumption.
“SCiFi Foods is not the future we fear. It’s the future we dream of.”
That’s the message on the homepage of SciFi Foods, an alt-protein company from California. The future it’s referring to is cultivated meat, but just not in the way you’ve imagined it. SciFi Foods is taking the best of two worlds – the superior taste credentials of cultured proteins and the cost-effectiveness and scalability of plant-based ingredients – to create a hybrid beef product.
There are many reasons for this. First, while Americans may have a bad rep when it comes to meat-eating, plant-based consumption, and linking meat and dairy intake to climate change, a 1,022-person survey by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) this May found that the climate impact of meat and poultry affects the purchasing decisions of 62% of US citizens – for seafood, that number is 45%.
Secondly, Americans have some concerns about the way meat is produced in the country. According to a 1,018-person poll last December by the Good Food Institute (GFI), 46% of Americans are worried about the use of antibiotics. Over a third (36%) are perturbed by the oligopolistic nature of the US meat industry that is dominated by a few very large, and very powerful, corporations, and by the treatment of animals (35%).
Third, there’s a reason why only two companies are authorised to sell cultivated meat in the US. It’s still a relatively nascent category with a tall ladder to climb, not least in terms of regulatory hurdles, production costs and scalability. This problem is exacerbated when you realise that, as per the GFI survey, 46% of Americans are concerned about the rising costs of meat as well.
Reuters claims that cultivated meat needs to reach production costs of $2.92 per pound to be price-competitive with traditional meat. Neither Upside Foods nor Eat JUST, the only two producers with US regulatory approval, have disclosed the absolute per pound costs of their respective cultivated chicken. While cultured meat companies have managed to cut manufacturing costs by 99% in less than a decade, McKinsey analysis estimates that it will still take until 2030 for it to reach price parity with its conventional counterparts, which feels like a long time away.
Despite all that, 45% of respondents in GFI’s survey said they’d likely try cultivated meat. Crucially, this was after the technology was properly described to them. You can look at that as a glass half-empty or half-full manner: nearly half of Americans are receptive to cultured meat, but more than half are not.
Courtesy: SciFi Foods
The problem with blended meat
All this leaves cultivated meat in limbo. Some companies – like 50/50 Foods and Mush Foods – are betting on blended meat, which differs from hybrid in that it pairs plant proteins with conventional meat. It’s a way people can “have their meat and eat it too”, as 50/50 Foods CEO Andrew Arentowicz told Green Queen last month.
But that category has had its ups and downs, with meat giants like Tyson Foods and retailers like Aldi introducing and subsequently pulling blended meat products from the market. The IFIC survey revealed that while 14% of Americans were eating more blended meats in the last year, that is a decline from the growth seen the year before. Plus, a higher number (20%) are eating fewer of these products, while an equal number have never consumed it.
Plant-based meat has reached mainstream recognition and cultivated meat is making headlines with its regulatory approvals, crowding out the category before you even consider fermentation-based proteins. GFI notes that blended may need support in establishing a value proposition with consumers and needs to reach a broader meat-eating audience to access its full potential.
Allaying consumer concerns
SciFi Foods founders Joshua March and Kasia Gora | Courtesy: SciFi Foods
Which brings us back to the future according to SciFi Foods. “We know that 100% cultivated meat may take decades to develop, while hybrid products are possible today,” says its co-founder and CEO Joshua March. “Products that blend plant-based meat with conventional meat are great in concept,” he adds, “but buying food is a very emotional decision.”
This is because “a significant part of the benefit of eating meat alternatives comes from the emotional satisfaction of knowing that no animal was killed”, alongside the climate factor – it’s no secret that plant-based alternatives are much more climate-friendly than meat. “That emotional impact is just not there if ‘slightly fewer animals died for this burger’,” outlines March. “This isn’t about marketing messages, but rather the emotional impact of different products, which make a huge impact.”
But look at the flipside then. Why would meat-eaters who are indifferent to plant-based alternatives and apprehensive of cultivated proteins want to replace their meat with a mix of these two? “We think getting on the market ASAP with an amazing product is the best way to attract all consumers, and our brand is about a tasty burger that uses cultivated beef cells as their magic ingredient,” explains March. “We think the novelty of the cells will attract early consumers, including meat-eaters, and the taste will keep them coming back.”
He continues: “Ultimately, concepts like hybrid or blended are more industry terms and have little relevance for the average consumer.” He punctuates this point with the example of fellow Californian alt-meat company Impossible Foods. “Today, consumers routinely buy the Impossible Burger without dissecting its composition, which includes recombinant proteins produced through precision fermentation [the company’s signature heme ingredient] blended with isolated plant proteins and other ingredients.”
Price parity and 2024 launch plans
Courtesy: SciFi Foods
Previously called Artemys Foods, SciFi Foods emerged from stealth last year with a $22M Series A round led by blue chip Silicon Valley VC Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), moving into a new 16,000 sq ft pilot facility. Even with hybrid products, March says the biggest challenges are cost and scale: “Scaling up a novel biomanufacturing process is always hard, but it’s especially hard if you are producing commodity products at competitive prices.”
In July last year, the startup announced it had achieved price parity with conventional beef using a combination of its proprietary high-throughput cell line engineering and CRISPR technology. The latter is a piece of tech adapted from a genome editing system used by bacteria for immunity and has been touted as a potential embryonic treatment for several hereditary diseases (though it carries some controversy, as studies say altering the DNA of embryos or eggs and sperm could cause mutations that lead to other health threats).
SciFi Foods has experimented with 10-20% cultivated proteins mixed with plant-based proteins (primarily soy) to produce a burger it claims will cost under $10 to make at its facility, with scaled-up manufacturing potentially driving costs further down to $1 per burger.
March points to the industrial fermentation space for proof points that price parity for this sector is possible. “But,” he adds, “there is only one reasonable blueprint for how to get there: a very simple process with minimal downstream processing and robust cell lines that grow well with low-cost inputs.
“Many of those cell lines are optimised through genetic engineering to approach the maximum theoretical performance for converting feed to product. We believe that all of the same principles apply to cultivated meat, which informs our unique strategy.” And since SciFi Foods is making hybrid beef, it doesn’t “need to worry about tissue maturation or scaffolding, which dramatically reduces the complexity and cost” of its process.
Steve Molino, Principal at US venture fund Clear Current Capital, which backs food system disruptors, says he thinks the SciFi team is on the right track strategically. “While some are obsessing over how to create 100% cultivated products, I agree with SCiFi’s approach of understanding the minimum inclusion rate required to create the same experience as conventional beef. This strategy will allow for the improved unit economics and scale that will ultimately maximize the chances of reaching commercial viability.” Note: Clear Current Capital is not an investor in SciFi Foods.
Courtesy: SciFi Foods
The company plans to launch through foodservice channels – as Eat JUST’s GOOD Meat and Upside Foods have done – at the end of 2024, pending regulatory approval. SciFi’s cultivated beef product, which the company hopes will be the first cultivated beef product to launch on the market globally, will need to be cleared for sale by the FDA, while its harvest process and product labelling will be supervised by the USDA.
Molino recently attended a SciFi Foods burger tasting and left very impressed: “Cultivated companies will not be successful by creating things that are simply better than plant-based products. They’ll win if they can create the same, ordinary experience animal products offer, which is loved by the masses. The SciFi burger did just that, and both myself and the meat eater I brought along with me thought ‘it simply tastes like a good hamburger’.
The company’s Series A round was followed by a partnership with Michigan State University to test and finalise the plant-based part of its hybrid burger, as well as further investments that have taken total financing to over $40M. One of its early backers was the British brand Coldplay, so it does beg the question: could the scientists at SciFi Foods fix you(r meat cravings)?
Shanghai-based cellular agriculture startup CellX, known for cultivated meat, has ventured into mycelium fermentation to expand its portfolio of sustainable proteins. The company plans to use fermented proteins in meat and dairy alternatives and combine them with cultured proteins to make more affordable hybrid meat, with regulatory filings planned for China and overseas.
CellX’s mycelium venture comes three months after it opened China’s first large-scale cultivated meat pilot factory. At the time, the company had stressed the importance of price parity with animal-derived meat, with production costs at well below $100 per lb of cultured meat already (although it would need to reach $2.92 to be price-competitive).
The new mycelium programme helps this cause. CellX says mycelium proteins have near-term advantages in both cost and scale and have differences in raw material performance. This will help supplement the company’s mid-range protein product portfolio.
CellX’s fermentation protein raw material uses a mycelium strain that boasts over 40% protein and over 20% dietary fibre, and is rich in trace elements and active ingredients like antioxidants. Plus, its amino acid score coefficient is as high as 0.98, which is on par with conventional beef.
After screening for 2,000 microbial strains, the company has found several fungi strains suitable for fermentation in collaboration with “well-known institutions in China”. It has already commenced its fermentation process, with a pilot production of 10 cubic metres. And it intends to partner with downstream developers to create new meat and dairy alternatives as well as functional foods using its mycelium protein.
Advancing the hybrid meat category in China
CellX will also tap into the cost-effectiveness of mycelium fermentation to “enhance the competitiveness” of its cultivated meat portfolio by creating hybrid meat products – which combine cultivated proteins with plant-based and fermented ones. This reduces the cost of cultivated meat, which as mentioned is still far from price parity, and ensures the same, “if not better”, nutritional profile as conventional meat.
The company has previously showcased hybrid products, exhibiting a cultured minced pork product mixed with plant protein in 2021. CellX believes these are “ultimately a more compelling product choice for the consumer”. It’s a path taken by several companies globally, allowing them to go to market faster, given the cheaper production costs and more scalable manufacturing aspect.
Courtesy: CellX
CellX’s mycelium venture is a shrewd move, given that it’s a market set to grow by 7.7% annually to reach $5.21B in 2030. According to one estimate, China produced 75% of mycelium globally in recent years. But while there are a host of companies working with fungi-based meats around the world – like Meati, Quorn and Libre Foods, to name a few – there aren’t many doing so in China. Last year, Shanghai-based 70/30 Food Tech became the country’s first mycelium protein company.
Courtesy: CellX
Other companies working with fermentation proteins in China include ProTi Food Tech, Blue Canopy, Changing Bio and Geb Impact Technology. In a report evaluating the fermentation protein market in China, Tao Zhang, co-founder of Chinese alt-protein investment firm Dao Foods, wrote: “The fermentation approach has a lot of potential in China given its history in the country, China’s manufacturing advantage, and its relatively faster speed in terms of mass commercialisation.”
He added: “Without a doubt, China can play an important role in both the strategy and execution of any new protein company [that] has the wish and will to learn and take advantage of what China can offer on this front for these reasons.”
Outside China, California’s The Better Meat Co. and Israel-based Mush Foods both make mycelium-based proteins for applications in blended meat (which refers to a mix of conventional and plant proteins).
Regulatory approval and government support for alt-protein
CellX, which has raised over $20M following a Series A+ round in June, has earmarked 2025 as a launch year for both its cultivated and fermented proteins. Its co-founder and CEO Ziliang Yang previously confirmed to Green Queen that the company was planning to file for regulatory approval for its cultured meat in Singapore and the US – the only two countries that have cleared the sale of these products.
Now, the company says it’s preparing to submit an application to regulators in both China and abroad for its mycelium protein. A report earlier this year by Asia Research Engagement suggested that 50% of China’s protein consumption must come from alt-protein sources if it is to decarbonise, with 24% coming from plant-based proteins, 16% from fermentation-derived protein, and 10% from cultivated meat/seafood.
Courtesy: CellX
This spells an opportunity for CellX, which is working on cultured beef, pork, poultry and seafood, especially given the fact that China’s one-billion-plus population leads the world in meat consumption. There’s also proof that consumers are interested in cultured meat, with one survey revealing that 90% of its citizens are willing to combine their meat intake with cultivated proteins. Last year, the industry association the China Cellular Agriculture Forum (which includes CellX) held its first event, attended by about 30 companies.
There is government support too. Last year, China included cultivated meat and future foods in its five-year agricultural plan. And earlier this week, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization collaborated with the China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment to host a roundtable meeting on cultivated food production and precision fermentation. The meeting provided international stakeholders to discuss the latest developments in regulation and production, an event that CellX called “a significant milestone in the development of cultivated meat and precision fermentation in China”.
Green Queen talks to Californian biotech startup Triplebar’s CEO Maria Cho about how the company’s product design engine helps make precision fermentation and cultivated meat proteins more scalable and more affordable on a shortened timeline.
Powered by AI and machine learning, Triplebar has closed a $20M funding round to expand its biomanufacturing platform and portfolio in food and pharmaceuticals. The company has developed a high-throughput screening platform that combines microfluidics and hyperspeed testing with AI and machine learning to develop biomanufacturing platforms for microbial or animal cells. It’s described as a “microprocessor for biology”, which integrates hardware, software, biology and biochemistry to miniaturise and accelerate evolution.
Its latest $20M investment round, which takes total funding to $25M, was led by Synthesis Capital, with participation from Essential Capital, Stray Dog Capital, iSelect Fund, and existing investor The Production Board. Triplebar is a foundry business of the latter, the startup’s first and major investor.
“For truly disruptive adoption to take place, alternative products need to at least match animal-based proteins on taste, price, convenience, and nutrition,” said Synthesis Capital co-founder and partner Rosie Wardle in a statement. “We believe Triplebar’s technology platform has the potential to bring entire portfolios of bioproducts to market, helping a wide range of companies, from incumbents to startups, to scale up production while reducing cost.”
Courtesy: Triplebar
An advanced platform for alt-protein production
Triplebar works on two kinds of animal proteins, derived from precision fermentation (via yeast or bacteria) and cell cultivation. For the former, it focuses on bioactive proteins that provide health benefits when consumed, but whose natural source (dairy or otherwise) constrains the supply and limits access to this ingredient,” explains Cho. “We make the production system that allows for low-cost, animal-free scaling of these ingredients to provide access for everyone.”
As for cultivated meat, the startup addresses a key bottleneck: the evolution of animal cells so they can grow effectively in a fermentation vessel similar to those used for brewing beer. “Once this is achieved, critical barriers associated with cost and production volume can be overcome,” says Cho.
A growing number of companies are using synthetic biology – already a $13.4B market – to create alt-proteins. Boston-based Ginkgo Bioworks provides its cell-programming platform to a host of startups, for example. What advantage does Triplebar provide? “Triplebar makes it possible to use evolutionary design to optimise the cell lines (bacterial, fungal or animal) that are the foundation of alt-protein technology,” explains Cho.
A biotech veteran and a biochemist by training, Cho has amassed over 15 years of experience building industry-leading teams in industries such as therapeutics and cosmetics. In 2019, Cho founded Phage microbiome product company Phi Therapeutics, which debuted the Phyla system- the first-ever probiotic skincare range.
Courtesy: Triplebar
“We do this by dramatically increasing test throughput compared to other methods, allowing us to scan every base pair every day in an entire genome of these cell lines for improvements that occur randomly. This rapid cycle of insight-free improvement builds on itself exponentially to quickly deliver cell line performance that makes alt-protein products affordable and scalable.
“By contrast, traditional methods have a test throughput three or four orders of magnitude less than ours, meaning these methods rely on [a] poor understanding of how cells work to make progress. This traditional route is slow and expensive, leading to the incredibly high capital barrier and low success rate of alt-protein products getting to market historically.”
Solving the cost and speed issues
Triplebar boasts a much faster rate of testing and discovery. “Because we can look at every base pair in a genome in a day, we can find improvements quickly and do so without relying on humanity’s incomplete understanding of how organisms actually function,” notes Cho. “This means that we can hit performance targets in months that would normally take years.”
Additionally, the startup claims its platform can develop biological systems that enable low-cost manufacturing, another bottleneck of the alt-protein sector. “We make progress using evolutionary design, which does not rely on a rational understanding of how a cell works. This means that we can optimise a cell to be maximally efficient at producing a protein regardless of the cell type or protein,” says Cho.
Courtesy: FrieslandCampina
“This maximal efficiency translates to a low-cost production system for precision fermentation or cultivated meat. It also means that cell lines can be evolved to fit into current at-scale processes, reducing process innovation requirements that impact cost and timeline to scale.”
She adds that cellular agriculture faces a host of issues, including cost, taste, consumer acceptance and scale. A 1,018-person survey commissioned by the Good Food Institute found that 45% of respondents are willing to try cultivated meat once explained to them. Meanwhile, a 1,930-person poll by the UK Food Standards Agency – the body responsible for regulatory approval of these proteins – found that only a third (34%) of Brits are open to eating cultured meat, with only 30% considering it safe.
“We help companies find the right cell lines with which to make their products,” says Cho. “The right cell line makes a massive contribution to cost and scale, and can even have impacts on taste and consumer acceptance.”
Collaborations and ultimate mission
Triplebar has established multiple undisclosed partnerships with manufacturers across sectors like food, healthcare and more. Two prominent publicly known collaborations are with Singaporean cultivated seafood producer Umami Bioworks and global ingredients giant FrieslandCampina Ingredients (FCI).
With Umami Bioworks, Triplebar is co-developing optimised cell lines suited to large-scale production of cultivated seafood, starting with one of the most critically endangered fish species, Japanese eel. The link-up will include improving the “fitness and performance” of cell lines to enable lower-cost, more efficient manufacturing of cultured proteins.
Umami Bioworks will leverage Triplebar’s ‘Hyper-Throughput’ platform to discover solutions, testing “millions of potential phenotypic solutions in the time it normally takes to search mere hundreds” to accelerate cell line development and optimisation without the need for genetic modification.
Courtesy: Umami Bioworks
The FCI partnership focuses on bringing multiple protein ingredients to market via precision fermentation, a technology it has been using since 2016 to produce human milk oligosaccharides. The collaboration with Triplebar involves multiple programmes, including many elements “like product testing, strain engineering, scale-up manufacturing, regulatory approval, and commercialisation”, says Cho. “So we will be working with them for years. We are thrilled to partner with FCI to make a lasting impact on the way protein ingredients are produced.”
By helping companies release low-cost products that change our food system’s impact on the climate and human health, Cho says the startup’s mission is to “feed and heal people and planet”. “We envision a future where a mature bio-economy can deliver to humanity products that allow us to live sustainably at scale,” she adds.
“This mature bio-economy, like other mature markets, is an ecosystem where companies work together in stratified supply chains to increase the flow and value of products to consumers. We want to play our part in the mature bio-economy and enable others to do the same.”
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.”
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