It’s early days, says the Good Food Institute (GFI), but microbial fermentation is rapidly emerging as the “third pillar in the alternative protein industry [alongside cell-cultured and plant-based]," attracting $435m in investment capital in 2020 alone.
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Clean meat start-ups are mushrooming, but Japanese citizen-science community Shojinmeat is using an alternative home-based DIY approach to accelerate innovation. “I started this whole thing because of science fiction,” says Dr Yuki Hanyu, co-founder of non-profit cultured-meat collective Shojinmeat. “Cell-based meat happens everywhere in manga and anime sci-fi.
Until late last year, very few had heard of Israel-based 3D-printed cultured meat company Meat-Tech 3D. The publicly traded company has its eyes on bringing technology to make 3D-printed cell-based meat available to the world as quickly as possible. As the only cultured meat company that is publicly traded on any exchange right now, Meat-Tech is starting to make waves.
As the field of cellular agriculture continues to attract significant investment, this piece explores the kinds of patent filings we might begin to see as innovator companies focus their R&D efforts on addressing the technical challenges associated with delivering cultured meat to the mass market.
What is the future of food? Looking at what’s on shelves and in freezers during a quick trip to the local grocery store, it’s easy to see that we are quickly moving towards a future of plant-based foods. Jon McIntyre, CEO of Motif FoodWorks, shared his company’s strategy for revolutionizing plant-based foods through microbes and fermentation and his views on the future of food and synthetic biology.
Oliver Zahn began his professional career studying the stars. The founder of Climax Foods, a startup that’s using data science to replace animal proteins with plant-based substitutes, spent years at the University of California at Berkeley with his eyes fixed firmly toward the heavens before taking up with Pat Brown and Impossible Foods as the company’s leading data scientist. That experience focused Zahn on more terrestrial concerns and undoubtedly led the founder down the path to launching Climax Foods.
By optimizing culture media ingredients specifically for cultivated meat production, and by producing those ingredients at scale, costs may be reduced to as little as $0.24 per liter. This would enable cell-cultured meat produced in bioreactors to reach prices competitive with their animal-based counterparts. But investment and demand needed to reach those economies of scale remain a constraint on lowering cultivated meat production costs.
While last week’s episode involved complicated VR camera rigs, this week’s episode covers how Johnson and his team used off-the-shelf technology and internet-enabled hidden cameras to capture the footage. We explore what this means for the future of surveillance, and the concept of sousveillance—using the same technology to surveil powerful entities instead of the other way around.
MeaTech Ltd. the Israeli startup that is developing technology for bioprinting meat using stem cells announced on Monday that it had reached a substantial product milestone. The company said its scientists had successfully printed a layer of meat combining both muscle and fat cells that successfully fused. MeaTech added that reaching the strategic milestone ahead of its pre-set schedule means they are well on their way to hit the next milestone, which is printing a 100-gram (quarter pound) steak, without harming any animals.
Fork and Goode is a Brooklyn-based cultivated meat company developing large-scale cell culture systems for growing pork. This patent application, filed in August 2018, describes Fork and Goode’s novel bioreactor system aimed at providing a cheaper alternative to animal-derived serums and recombinant growth factors.
A key challenge for producing cultivated meat is that kilograms of biomass must be efficiently created from just a few cells removed from a live animal as a biopsy or initiated from a cell line. The process used to produce massive quantities of cells is typically carried out in a specialized tank called a bioreactor – the same technology used to grow the specialized cells that produce many types of biologic drugs.
