Ferming Over Farming, Lab-Grown Meat
Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet..
It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour...
This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow.
"Ferming is the new farming"
"Wildtype is on a mission to create the “cleanest, most sustainable seafood on the planet” – starting with salmon. Through 'cellular agriculture', it’s creating 'sushi-grade' cuts of salmon by raising cells from Pacific salmon in bioreactors, where they are programmed to organise and mature in the same way that they would within the fish.
Aryé Elfenbein, cardiologist and co-founder of Wildtype, compares the mechanics to that of a brewery. Not only will Wildtype salmon be healthier for humans (it won’t contain any microplastics, mercury or parasites) but it will be better for the planet, too, because it will be produced in “closed, animal-free systems designed to keep fish in the water and out of farms”. It will also be far less cruel"
Lab-grown Fat, Hoxton Farms
Cultivating animal fat for plant-based meat..
Hoxton Farms says plant-based meat alternatives are missing 'one crucial ingredient': fat.. [S]tart-up Hoxton Farms is cultivating animal fat for plant-based meat alternatives. What is the secret to the duo’s competitive edge? Computational biology, the founders tell FoodNavigator. The global meat market is worth some 1.3trn. The newer, plant-based meat alternative market is valued around the 4.3bn mark. Yet despite their sizeable values, entrepreneurs Ed Steele and Dr Max Jamilly say both industries have serious flaws. “The global meat market is broken. It’s killing us, it’s killing the planet,” said Dr Jamilly.“2020 was a great example of how global food security is at an all-time low.
Food supply is fragile and traditional intensive agriculture has a big role in the spread of animal-borne disease, antibiotic resistance, and its enormous impact on climate. While demand for plant-based meat alternatives is soaring – MarketsandMarkets expects the sector to be worth $8.3bn by 2025 – the duo firmly believes that plant-based meat alternatives still aren’t good enough. "And that’s because it is missing this one crucial ingredient, which is fat.” Dr Jamilly told FoodNavigator. "And that’s where we come in." The plant oil problem: "Nobody wants a burger that tastes of coconut". The duo's start-up, Hoxton Farms, makes cell-based animal fat. Its initial goal is to sell its cultivated offering to plant-based meat companies as a replacement of vegetable oil.
In doing so, industry can finally replace plant oils and create meat alternatives that 'look, cook and taste just as good as the real thing', said Dr Jamilly, 'if not better'. So what is Hoxton Farms' beef with plant-based oils?
According to the co-founder, plant-based oils can be detrimental to the environment and underperform on taste and functionality. “People have been trying to get plant oils to perform like animal fat for over 150 years, since the French invented margarine, and we haven’t gone far beyond that in the intervening time. The problem is that plant oils are very bad for the environment – unsustainably sourced palm oil and coconut oil in particular – and they have the wrong taste," said Dr Jamilly. "... Plant oils have a low melting temperature, which can make the finished product greasy rather than juicy, says Hoxton Farms. From a functionality perspective, Hoxton Farms also find plant oils lacking. "Their melting temperature is very low, which means that if the fat hasn’t melted out of the product on the supermarket shelves, then it definitely does when you put it in the pan or the oven," the co-founder continued. This can result in a greasy, rather than juicy, sensation. "And that’s not to mention the health impact of plant oils, and the fact that to cover up their taste, plant-based meat contains a huge amount of salt and other flavourings."..
Hoxton Farms' response to these ‘unsatisfactory’ plant-based fats is to do somewhat of a U-turn and focus on animal fats. "Animal fats, because of their structure and chemical properties, have a much better melting temperature which makes them really juicy. They also have a better taste, and that’s what we’re trying to deliver," explained Dr Jamilly.
Rather than use plant oils, which the co-founder described as a ‘dodgy substitute’, Hoxton Farms suggests food makers use its cultivated animal fat. “It’s a product we know and love, and is the most important sensory component of the meat we eat. “But we’re producing it with none of the ethical or environmental hang-ups of traditional meat.” Hoxton Farms' first product is a versatile cultured fat intended for a variety of products. What is particularly exciting about the technology, fellow co-founder Steele explained, is its ability to meet customisation demands. "By feeding the fat cells something different, we can get them to essentially create different fats inside the cells. This means that we end up with different flavours and taste compositions, for example, or different nutritional profiles, densities, and melting properties" – all of which are really important to plant-based meat companies.
Why Mission Barns believes cultivated fat is the key to better plant-based meat In taste tests, CEO Eitan Fischer said more than 90% of consumers preferred meat analogs made with cultivated fat over plant equivalents...
Fischer thinks the public is ready for Mission Barns’ cultivated fat. He first got involved in cultivated meat after he realized that although people care about sustainability and animal cruelty when it comes to food, they still want to eat what they want to eat.
As he thought about what products to create through cell cultivation technology, Fischer considered the areas that no other companies had been working on in the space...
All of those questions, he said, pointed at animal fat as the answer. Fat cells grow more quickly than those for muscles, Fischer said. Unlike muscle cells cultivated for meat cuts, which need a precise amount of amino acids and other nutrients, fat cells can grow on much cheaper nutrients like sugars. Fat cells don’t need to be in any sort of defined shape or format, unlike meat cuts. And, Fischer added, fat cells just like “to sit there and accumulate more and more mass really quickly. We could grow, we believe, fat about 10x more efficiently than muscle,” Fischer said. “And so for that reason, we think we will have 10 times as much product and we’ll be at cost parity 10 times faster.”
Only one other large company in this space is making cell-based fat: Peace of Meat, which is a part of MeaTech 3D. The company is working to scale up with a 21,530-square-foot plant under construction in its home country of Belgium that is slated to begin operation next year. Last month, Peace of Meat signed a joint development agreement to provide avian cultured fat for the chicken analog products of European mycoprotein-based meat maker Enough.
[The company's] first plant to produce their juicy holy grail will be set in the Belgian city of Antwerp, where Peace of Meat is located since 2019. In late 2021, the wholly own Belgian subsidiary was able to produce a 700 gram jar of chicken fat biomass in a single production cycle: “I think the decisions that we've made in the very beginning to select a very specific cell type that nobody else was using and nobody else is still using in the culture meatspace has proven a good decision,” says Dirk Standaert, CEO of Peace of Meat...
The current bioreactor allows the company to work on such volumes: “But our target obviously, is to upscale further. The new facility will be used for R&D purposes and we will be able to house a lot more people,” he explains, as his team has grown exponentially in just one year...
In total, with just its first plant, MeaTech could produce around 20 tons of biomass per year, to be added as an ingredient to hybrid meat alternatives... MeaTech plans to establish between four to five factories worldwide by 2025, which could produce around 560 tons of biomass per year. Adding just one single ingredient able to give meatier and juicy features would be an asset for companies that wish to find solutions to enhance the taste and mouthfeel of their products, while lowering costs and ingredients lists.
The company is further extending their collaboration with the Dutch based mycoprotein start up ENOUGH, which will combine the chicken biomass within their plant based matrix...