The market for lab-grown meat, also called cultivated or cell-cultured meat, is expected to reach $1.99 billion by 2035, growing at an annual rate of 21.4%. Beef is poised to be the dominant segment.
The market got a boost last month when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave what amounts to a safety blessing to Upside Foods, a cultivated meat product startup, effectively setting in motion what many of these companies have been working toward: accelerated commercialization.
The FDA concluded that it had “no further questions” related to how Upside is producing its chicken made from the cultured cells of animals and said it is working with other cultivated meat companies in other pre-market consultation discussions.
However, cultivated meat continues to struggle with cost; chiefly how expensive it is to make products, which means that having price parity with traditional meat isn’t likely to happen soon. There’s also the all-important perspective of taste: Will people really want to eat these products?
While companies are working on taste, they are also making claims about the sustainability of the cultivated meat industry. A Good Food Institute report from last year showed that cultivated meat production processes could significantly reduce both global warming and land use. For beef, it can be, in some cases, reductions of more than 80% in environmental impact when compared to traditional beef production.
Today, cultivated meat startup SCiFi Foods, which raised $22 million this summer, revealed results from an analysis it conducted with The Ohio State University. It showed that 1 kilogram of its SCiFi burger had a smaller environmental impact than a traditional beef patty.
SCiFi’s burger consists of cultivated beef cells and plant-based ingredients, like water and soy protein isolate. Its production showed an overall greenhouse gas emissions reduction of 88.5%, while reducing energy use by 37.7%, land use by 90.6% and water use by 96.9%, according to a press release.
The company claims it is the first to have a study like this to prove its sustainability claims. SCiFi co-founder and CEO Joshua March told TechCrunch via email that “all previous studies were performed on generic, non-specific cultivated meat (pork, chicken, etc.). This is the first study that clearly lays out and quantifies the sustainable benefits of cultivated beef cells in detail. What makes it even more exciting is the potential for us to make our numbers even more impactful by using renewable sources of energy.”
SCiFi Foods is based in San Leandro, California, and plans to break ground on a pilot plant in 2023 and get its blended burgers into the market sometime in 2024.
While energy use reduction was a smaller number in SCiFi Foods’ survey, a study referenced in its paper also examined and estimated the environmental impact of cultured cells grown in hollow-fiber bioreactors. That study found that “production of the ingredients for the culture medium of cultured meat and the energy requirement of the bioreactor used for the cultured meat production are the major factors affecting the environmental impacts of cultured meat production.”
That’s why some companies are going in a different direction with energy use. Orbillion Bio announced a partnership with Solar Biotech to make its premium cell-cultured Wagyu beef for U.S. consumers using solar energy and water-neutral production facilities.
Orbillion said the companies will work together to scale up to 20,000-liter bioreactors so that Orbillion can generate capacity for annual production of over 4 million pounds of its meat, also giving it “a clear path to the U.S.-based commercialization of its first product.”
Orbillion is working with Luiten Food to bring its meats to Europe by 2025 and aims to achieve price parity with conventional meat by 2026 and commodity pricing for beef by 2030.
Where’s the beef?
If cell-cultured meat doesn’t sound appealing, other startups are exploring alternatives and picking up steam. Mycelium, the structural fibers of fungi used to make proteins that mimic animal meat, is also an area predicted to gain traction and investor attention in the future. For example, Meati Foods, which produces the Eat Meati brand of proteins made from mushroom root, raised $150 million this year.
MyForest Foods’ co-founder and CEO Eben Bayer said via email that biotechnology will lead the next generation of food development and that MyForest Foods plans to introduce new crop opportunities, including indoor vertical farm retrofits to grow raw mycelium.
Kinoko, an Israeli food tech company using fermentation to create mycelium, said it obtained self-affirmed GRAS (generally recognized as safe) status and will expand into the U.S. market with its alternative protein.
This means “a company has convened a panel of experts to assess the safety of a particular ingredient and then informed the FDA (via a “GRAS notification”) of their determination that the use of a substance is generally recognized as safe,” according to the FDA.
Funding and the future of food tech
Venture capital investment in food tech has been light lately, but some companies are managing to grab new rounds. NotCo closed on $70 million in a funding round it is labeling a Series D1, led by Princeville Capital.
The company’s artificial intelligence technology, Giuseppe, matches animal proteins to their ideal replacements among thousands of plant-based ingredients. NotCo’s products are under the NotCo Food brand, including NotMilk, NotBurger and NotChicken. The new capital enables the company to create a business-to-business unit so that other consumer packaged goods brands, ingredient suppliers and technology providers can use Giuseppe to innovate their own plant-based products. You can read more about the company’s previous $235 million round at a $1.5 billion valuation.
Equinom, which makes plant protein ingredients, raised $35 million in a round led by Synthesis Capital.
The company’s Manna technology platform uses algorithms to characterize the biochemical and genomic traits in seed varieties, including pea and soy, to optimize them for use in alternatives to meat and dairy. The new tranche gives Equinom total funding of over $71 million, which will be deployed into accelerated commercialization of its ingredients to be sold to food companies and additional R&D into other protein source crops including chickpea, fava, mung bean and cowpea.
Believer Meats, meanwhile, began construction on the Israel-based cultivated meat company’s first U.S. commercial-scale production facility in Wilson, North Carolina. The company is touting it as the “largest cultivated meat production center in the world.” Once the 200,000-square-foot facility is fully operational, Believer said it will be able to produce around 10,000 metric tons of cultivated meat, or 22 million pounds.
Ÿnsect, an insect production company, said it is expanding its insect farm project in the United States with the construction of its first large-scale farm that will begin in 2023. The Paris-based company already has a mealworm farm in Nebraska that opened earlier this year. As part of the new insect farm, Ÿnsect will work with Ardent Mills, a flour milling and ingredient company, to explore product opportunities.