meat substitutes
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Memphis Meats raised $161 million from SoftBank Group, Norwest and Temasek
Memphis Meats, a developer of technologies to manufacture meat, seafood and poultry from animal cells, has raised $161 million in financing from investors, including Softbank Group, Norwest and Temasek, the investment fund backed by the government of Singapore.
The investment brings the company’s total financing to $180 million. Previous investors include individual and institutional investors like Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Threshold Ventures, Cargill, Tyson Foods, Finistere, Future Ventures, Kimbal Musk, Fifty Years and CPT Capital.
Other companies, including Future Meat Technologies, Aleph Farms, Higher Steaks, Mosa Meat and Meatable, are pursuing meat grown from cell cultures as a replacement for animal husbandry, whose environmental impact is a large contributor to deforestation and climate change around the world.
Innovations in computational biology, bio-engineering and materials science are creating new opportunities for companies to develop and commercialize technologies that could replace traditional farming with new ways to produce foods that have a much lower carbon footprint and bring about an age of superabundance, according to investors.
The race is on to see who will be the first to market with a product.
“For the entire industry, an investment of this size strengthens confidence that this technology is here today rather than some far-off future endeavor. Once there is a “proof of concept” for cultivated meat — a commercially available product at a reasonable price point — this should accelerate interest and investment in the industry,” said Bruce Friedrich, the executive director of the Good Food Institute, in an email. “This is still an industry that has sprung up almost overnight and it’s important to keep a sense of perspective here. While the idea of cultivated meat has been percolating for close to a century, the very first prototype was only produced six years ago.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Daring Foods will offer healthy, tasty plant-based chicken
Anyone who wants to eat a meatless burger has plenty of options — but what if you want to be a little healthier?
Daring Foods will soon be offering an alternative, in the form of plant-based chicken made from five non-genetically modified ingredients — water, soy, sunflower oil, salt and natural flavoring (a mix of paprika, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, mace, cardamom).
“We’re not here to be a gimmick, we’re here to be part of your life every day,” said Daring Foods co-founder and CEO Ross Mackay. “There’s a big need for plant-based food that’s actually healthy.”
The company started selling the first version of its Daring Pieces product in the United Kingdom at the beginning of this year.
Today, it announced that it has the backing of Rastelli Foods Group, a major U.S. food company supplying hotels, restaurants, retail markets and other commercial customers. In fact, Rastelli has committed $10 million to Daring, an investment that combines cash with infrastructure, sales and distribution support.
With Rastelli’s backing, Daring plans to launch in the United States in February, selling directly to consumers through its website, and also to restaurants and retailers. It sounds like the startup is committed to the U.S. market, and is shifting its headquarters from Glasgow to New York.
I had a chance to try Daring Pieces for myself, when Mackay cooked a light lunch for me earlier this month. He heated them on a pan with no extra seasoning, and they were ready in about eight minutes. He even encouraged me to eat it with my hands, to feel how Daring Pieces have the texture of real chicken.
As a vegetarian, I’m not exactly an authority on chicken, but I thought it tasted pretty close to the real thing. I even brought another portion home and cooked them for dinner a couple nights later.
Mackay is vegan himself, but he said his target audience is meat-eaters who are looking to a more plant-based diet. By focusing on chicken and white meat, he’s hoping to create what he calls a “second generation” of plant-based meat products — healthier than the first, and therefore a bigger part of everyday diets.
Plus, with Daring Pieces you don’t feel like you’ve had a heavy meal, and you can be comfortable knowing that there aren’t a bunch of artificial ingredients.
Powered by WPeMatico
Dutch startup Meatable is developing lab-grown pork and has $10 million in new financing to do it
Meatable, the Dutch startup developing cruelty-free technologies for manufacturing cultured meat, is pivoting to pork production as a swine flu epidemic ravages one quarter of the world’s pork supply — and has raised $10 million in financing to support its new direction.
When the company unveiled its technology last year, it was one of several companies working on the production of meat derived from animal cells — a method of meat production that theoretically has a far smaller carbon emissions footprint and is better for the environment than traditional animal farming.
At the time, it was one of several companies — including Memphis Meats, Future Meat Technologies, Aleph Farms, HigherSteaks and many, many pursuing technologies — to bring cultured beef to market. Now, as pork prices rise globally, Meatable becomes one of the first companies to publicly shift gears and turn its attention to the other white meat.
That’s not the only way the company is setting itself apart from its peers in the market. Meatable is also an early claimant to a commercially viable, patented process for manufacturing meat cells without the need to kill an animal as a prerequisite for cell differentiation and growth.
Other companies have relied on fetal bovine serum or Chinese hamster ovaries to stimulate cell division and production, but Meatable says it has developed a process where it can sample tissue from an animal, revert that tissue to a pluripotent stem cell, then culture that cell sample into muscle and fat to produce the pork products that palates around the world crave.
“We know which DNA sequence is responsible for moving an early-stage cell to a muscle cell,” says Meatable chief executive Krijn De Nood.
To pursue its new path, the company has raised $7 million from a slew of angel and institutional investors and a $3 million grant from the European Commission . Angel investors include Taavet Hinrikus, the chief executive and co-founder of TransferWise, and Albert Wenger, a managing partner at the New York-based venture firm Union Square Ventures.
Meatable’s De Nood says that the new cash will be used to accelerate the development of its prototype. The small-scale bioreactor the company had initially targeted for development in 2021 will now be ready by 2020 and the company is hoping to have an industry-scale plant online manufacturing thousands of kilograms of meat by 2025, according to De Nood.
Industrial farming is responsible for between 14% and 18% of the greenhouse gas emissions linked to global climate change and Meatable argues that cultured (lab-grown) meat has the potential to use 96% less water and 99% less land than industrial farming. Powering facilities using renewable energy could further reduce emissions associated with meat production, according to Meatable.
Powered by WPeMatico
Novameat has a platform for 3D-printing steaks and has new money to take it to market
Novameat, a Spanish startup looking to accelerate the development of alternative proteins across the meat aisle, has gotten a boost in the form of new investment capital from the leading foodtech investment firm, New Crop Capital.
Founded by biomedical engineering expert Giuseppe Scionti, Novameat builds on Scionti’s decade of research as an assistant professor in bioengineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, the University College of London, Chalmers University and Polytechnic University of Milan.
The company first came to fame with the production of the world’s first 3D-printed plant-based beefsteak in 2018 and will use the new funds from New Crop Capital to further develop its platform for accelerating the development of meats like steak, chicken breasts and other fibrous textured meat replacements.
The company has developed a new scaffolding technology that mimics the texture, appearance, nutritional and sensorial properties of fibrous meats like beefsteaks, chicken breasts and fish filets.
Scionti sees the technology as the next step in the development of plant-based and lab-cultured alternatives to traditional proteins. While many clean meat and plant-based food companies have managed to take ground meat replacements to market with similar taste and textural qualities to the real thing, steaks and cuts of muscle meat have proven harder to replicate.
Novameat potentially solves that problem.
“While I was researching on regenerating animal tissues through bioprinting technologies for biomedical and veterinary applications, I discovered a way to bio-hack the structure of the native 3D matrix of a variety of plant-based proteins to achieve a meaty texture,” said Scionti, in a statement.
The core of Novameat’s technology is a customized printer that enables companies to create the kinds of fibrous tissues needed to make a steak. “We are providing the equipment, the machinery, under a licensing agreement to these companies,” says Scionti. “Plant-based meat manufacturers have access to something that creates the texture and taste of a steak.”
Traditional extrusion technologies are not capable of using the ingredients from Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods to print a steak, but Novameat’s founder argues that his technology can.
The technology was promising enough to attract the attention of New Crop Capital, arguably one of the most seasoned investors in the expanding market of meat replacement. The venture firm’s portfolio includes Memphis Meat, Beyond Meat, Kite Hill, Geltor, Good Dot, Aleph Farms, Supermeat, Mosa Meat, New Wave and Zero Egg.
“We think the global food supply chain is broken and we are focused on fixing one of those challenges, which is animal protein,” says New Crop Capital’s Dan Altschuler Malek. “We see that there is an opportunity to shift consumer behavior to reduce their consumption of animal protein products to products that are at the price point that people will pay.”
Novameat can help reduce costs, Malek thinks, because it speeds up the time to create meat substitutes.
Scionti says the company’s micro-extrusion technology enables companies to get a three-dimensional structure without having to go through an incubation period that can take a significant amount of time and increase costs.
“Novameat’s bioprinting-based technology provides a flexible and tunable method of producing plant-based meat, with the utility to create different textures from a wide variety of ingredients, all within a single piece of meat,” he said. “Low and high-moisture extruders are the primary method currently used to restructure plant proteins to create the texture of meat. While extrusion works well for some applications, this method may not be ideal for mimicking all types of animal meat. Alternative technologies like Novameat’s give plant-based meat manufacturers a wider array of tools to mimic all types of meat and seafood,” said Good Food Institute Director of Science and Technology David Welch, in a statement.
Powered by WPeMatico
Patrick Brown, the chief executive of Impossible Foods, is coming to Disrupt
Impossible Foods is having quite the year.
In the past seven months, the company has signed a nationwide deal with Burger King, weathered a demand surge that saw supplies dwindle and stocks of its signature Impossible burger sell out across the country, and raised fears among players in the $98 billion meat market that they could lose their grip on the American diet.
In October, the principal architect of this impossibly bold assault on the meat market will take the stage at Disrupt SF to talk about it all.
Patrick Brown has been on a wild ride since launching Impossible Foods in 2011. The idea for the company came to Brown, already a famous geneticist, while on sabbatical from his position as a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine.
In his earlier research Brown had already helped define the mechanism by which HIV and other retroviruses incorporate their genes into the cells they infect. At Stanford, Brown and his colleagues developed a new technology that lets researchers monitor the activity of all the genes in a genome and analyze, identify and interpret gene expression.
It was that work with genetics that led Brown to identify Impossible Foods’ key innovation, the development of synthetic heme — a molecule that makes meat… well… meaty.
Driven by the desire to address the environmental impact of animal farming, Brown and Impossible Foods have ambitious plans to develop plant-based alternatives to fish, poultry and beef around the world.
Along the way, Impossible has riled the beef industry, faced down supply chain snafus and made an unlikely ally in Burger King — one of the largest purveyors of beef patties in the U.S.
On our stage in San Francisco, Brown will talk about it all. It’s sure to be a fascinating conversation that will leave our audience with a lot of meaty issues to chew on.
Disrupt SF runs October 2 – October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here.
Powered by WPeMatico
Planted joins the meatless meat melee with its pea-protein ‘chicken’
Imitation meat is poised to expand its presence in our diets exponentially, if the success of dueling faux burger companies Impossible and Beyond are any indication — but where’s the chicken? Planted is a brand new Swiss company that claims its ultra-simple meatless poultry is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, better in other ways and, soon, cheaper.
Made from only pea protein, pea fiber, water and sunflower oil, the company’s first product, which they call planted.chicken, imitates the texture and flavor (or lack thereof) of chicken meat very closely.
There are no exotic substances or techniques involved, which keeps production simple and vegans happy. It’s created by making a sort of fibrous dough using the ingredients mentioned, then using a carefully configured extrusion machine to essentially recreate the structure of the muscle fibers that make up the bulk of meat. These are reassembled into larger pieces with a similar texture to a piece of chicken breast.
Of course it has different properties than real chicken — having no fat, collagen or other complex animal substances, it won’t cook the same and can’t be simply substituted in any recipe, though it should cook a lot like it on a grill or stovetop. So for the innumerable dishes where something like a simple grilled and/or chopped chicken breast is called for, the Planted product has been shown to be a great fit.
Strangely enough, it all began with perhaps the most unpalatable substance conceivable (don’t worry, it doesn’t go in the food): hagfish slime. This strange substance secreted by the deep-dwelling creatures has interesting properties that attracted the attention of Lukas Böni and Erich Windhab in the food sciences labs of ETH Zurich.
“This amazing natural hydrogel and [Lukas’s] biomimetic approaches strongly contribute to our understanding of meat-like structures today and how they can be mimicked and eventually even improved from a biomaterials perspective,” said co-founder Pascal Bieri.
Böni soon connected with his other co-founders, Eric Stirnemann and Pascal Bieri, who shared an interest in reducing the waste and ecological costs associated with meat production. Though they are not opposed to meat eating fundamentally, they deplore the enormous amounts of land required for it, unethical production methods and other unhealthy byproducts of the industry. Their hope is to convince meat eaters to choose less wasteful alternatives without asking them to compromise on the quality of the food.
Planted began selling its product in May, and only officially founded the company last week, although the team has been working for a year and a half on their first product. Böni brought the food science and biological materials knowledge, and Stirnemann is an expert in extrusion techniques; together they were able, after much experimentation, to produce a truly chicken-like substance.
From hagfish slime to chicken-like substance — it doesn’t really sound palatable. But leaving aside that little about food production is really table conversation, the proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the tasting, and tests along those lines have gone very well.
At tests in restaurants across Switzerland, reception has been great, with some consumers unable to tell it apart from the real thing. And this isn’t being substituted for ground chicken in a stew or something — it’s front and center.
“We put a lot of research into the product to make it extremely close to chicken,” said Bieri. “Hence we price around a premium chicken at this stage. We do see strong potential to produce our product at a lower cost mid-term, given strong economies of scale.”
Getting to that mid-term is the problem, of course, but given the frenzy of demand around fake meat and growing investment in alternative proteins, it probably won’t be hard to find investors. Though the company declined to detail its current funding, its FAQ says it is at the “seed stage,” and, although it is independent from ETHZ, it’s hard to imagine Planted will be leaving the nest without a bit of help from the university that spawned it.
Currently Planted’s chicken substitute is only available at a handful of restaurants while they work out the rest of the business and prepare to scale up. The company is planning to expand its commercial presence internationally by early next year, so until then keep an eye on the location list and drop by if you’re in Zurich or Bern.
Powered by WPeMatico
Tyson Foods investment arm backs another lab-grown meat manufacturer
The venture investment arm of massive meat manufacturer Tyson Foods is continuing its push into potential alternative methods of poultry production with a new investment in the Israeli startup Future Meat Technologies.
The backer of companies like the plant-based protein-maker Beyond Meat, and cultured-meat company Memphis Meats, Tyson Ventures’ latest investment is also tackling technology development to create mass-produced meat in a lab — instead of on the farm.
Future Meat Technologies is working to commercialize a manufacturing technology for fat and muscle cells that was first developed in the laboratories of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“It is difficult to imagine cultured meat becoming a reality with a current production price of about $10,000 per kilogram,” said Yaakov Nahmias, the company’s founder and chief scientist, in a statement. “We redesigned the manufacturing process until we brought it down to $800 per kilogram today, with a clear roadmap to $5-10 per kg by 2020.”
The deal marks Tyson’s first investment in an Israeli startup and gives the company another potential horse in the race to develop substitutes for the factory slaughterhouses that provide most of America’s meat.
“This is definitely in the Memphis Meats… in the lab-based meat world,” says Justin Whitmore, executive vice president of corporate strategy and chief sustainability officer of Tyson Foods.
Whitmore takes pains to emphasize that Tyson is continuing to invest in its traditional business lines, but acknowledges that the company believes “in exploring additional opportunities for growth that give consumers more choices,” according to a statement.
While startups like Impossible Foods are focused on developing plant-based alternatives to the proteins that give meat its flavor, Future Meat Technologies and Memphis Meats are trying to use animal cells themselves to grow meat, rather than basically harvesting it from dead animals.
Chef Uri Navon mixing ingredients with FMT’s cultured meat
According to Nahmias, animal fat produces the flavors and aromas that stimulate taste buds, and he says that his company can produce the fat without harvesting animals and without genetic modification.
For Whitmore, what separates Future Meat Technologies and Memphis Meats is the scale of the bioreactors that the companies are using to make their meat. Both companies — indeed all companies on the hunt for a meat replacement — are looking for a way around relying on fetal bovine serum, which is now a crucial component for any lab-cultured meats.
“I want my children to eat meat that is delicious, sustainable and safe,” said Nahmias, in a statement, “this is our commitment to future generations.”
The breadth of backgrounds among the investors that have come together to finance the $2.2 million seed round for Future Meat Technologies speak to the market opportunity that exists for getting a meat manufacturing replacement right.
“Global demand for protein and meat is growing at a rapid pace, with an estimated worldwide market of more than a trillion dollars, including explosive growth in China. We believe that making a healthy, non-GMO product that can meet this demand is an essential part of our mission,” said Rom Kshuk, the chief executive of Future Meat Technologies, in a statement.
One of the company’s first pilot products is lab-grown chicken meat that chefs have already used in some recipes.
FMT’s first cultured chicken kebab on grilled eggplant with tahini sauce
In addition to Tyson Ventures, investors in the Future Meat Technologies seed round included the Neto Group, an Israeli food conglomerate; Seed2Growth Ventures, a Chicago-based fund backed by Walmart wealth; BitsXBites, a Chinese food technology fund; and Agrinnovation, an Israeli investment fund founded by Yissum, the Technology Transfer Company of The Hebrew University,
“Hebrew University, home to Israel’s only Faculty of Agriculture, specializes in incubating applied research in such fields as animal-free meat sources. Future Meat Technologies’ innovations are revolutionizing the sector and leading the way in creating sustainable alternative protein sources,” said Dr. Yaron Daniely, president and CEO of Yissum.
Powered by WPeMatico