This Company Can Now Produce Cultivated Meat in Just Eight Days
Successfully scaling up production could pave the way for a world where cultivated meat satisfies the world's appetite for meat without harming people, animals, or the environment.
Meatable’s cultivated pork sausages. Credit Meatable
Meatable, a Dutch food tech company, has successfully shortened the production time for its cultivated pork meat from three weeks to just eight days, a significant step towards achieving mass production of slaughter-free meat.
This is a significant difference from traditional pork which typically requires eight months for a farmer to rear a pig for slaughter, involving eight months of feed, water, and antibiotics, as well as the extensive space, energy, and resources needed for industrial farming of thousands of animals.
“When it comes to creating cultivated meat, Meatable has demonstrated unbeatable efficiency in comparison to both traditional meat production and the cultivated meat industry average,” said Daan Luining, co-founder and CTO of Meatable. “Last year it would take us three weeks to differentiate cells, and now we’ve brought that down to only a few days.
“We expect to continue to reduce this time period further. Beyond this, we’ve created a product of the highest quality with the expressions of proteins and long fatty acid chains, essential to give meat its unique pork sensory experience.”
Saving Animals and the Planet
Over the last sixty years, global meat production has more than tripled and is projected to continue expanding, with estimates showing it will reach between 460 to 570 billion kg annually by 2050. The consequences of this are devastating.
Around 70 billion land animals are currently slaughtered for consumption every year. Animal agriculture is also the primary cause of deforestation worldwide and contributes to approximately 14 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. Industrial livestock farming accounts for about 70 percent of global antibiotic usage, and a quarter of all human diseases have origins in agriculture.
As the world's population approaches 10 billion and the demand for meat continues to rise, scientists are striving to create a solution to address these challenges.
‘Harm-Free Meat’
Cultivated meat, also known as cell-based meat, is created using animal cells to grow muscle tissue in a lab, which can then be harvested and processed into various meat products. This emerging industry has the potential to revolutionize the way we produce and consume meat, offering a more sustainable and ethical alternative to traditional animal agriculture.
Meatable's production time reduction is crucial in advancing the cultivated meat industry as it addresses one of the major challenges the industry is currently facing - scaling up production and achieving cost affordability.
“This marks a very important milestone for Meatable. We’ve now demonstrated that we have the world’s most efficient process, which is required if we are to create products that compete with the low prices of conventional meat,” said Krijn de Nood, co-founder and CEO of Meatable. “To achieve our vision of providing the world with harm-free meat, we have to be price competitive.”
Singapore currently stands as the only country in the world where consumers can purchase cell-based meat products. However, two cultivated meat companies, GOOD Meat and UPSIDE Foods, have recently made history after receiving a "no questions" letter from the FDA, which means that the regulatory body agrees with the assessment made by the companies that their cultivated chicken is deemed safe for consumption. They are now in the process of completing the remaining regulatory steps that will allow cultivated meat to be sold in the US.
As for Meatable, the company recently received the Singapore Food Agency’s (SFA) approval for the sale of its cultivated meat products. It now plans to introduce its pork sausage and dumpling products through a small-scale launch in Singapore next year, with the aim of reaching the mass market with a retail launch in 2025.
By 2035, Meatable aspires to save an estimated 27 million animal lives cumulatively.
A revolutionary, high-quality process
Meatable’s cultivated pork sausages. Credit Meatable
To create its cultivated meat, Meatable isolates a single animal cell and replicates its natural growth process using opti-ox™ technology in combination with pluripotent stem cells (PSCs).
PSCs can multiply indefinitely without alteration, giving them an advantage over immortalized cell lines which are more commonly found in the cultivated meat industry, but it can be challenging to change stem cells into more specialized cells such as muscle cells.
Yet, Opti-ox™ technology makes it possible to overcome this so Meatable can produce real muscle and fat cells that are fully differentiated in just a few days.
This is complemented by Meatable’s continuous perfusion process, which enables the company to work in a continuous cycle and generates cell densities of about 80 million cells per milliliter already, contributing to superior productivity so the process is easy to scale.
This is a landmark moment for the Dutch-based company and brings it closer to reaching its mission of satisfying the world’s growing appetite for meat without harming people, animals or the planet.
“With our recent achievements, we have created a production process that does exactly that, with cell densities of 80 million per milliliter, a continuous production process, and a differentiation time of only a few days,” said de Nood. “That combination enables us to create affordable cultivated meat at scale.
“I’m excited for the next steps to get our products regulated and ready for consumers to try next year so that we can satisfy the world’s appetite for meat without harming people, animals, or the planet.”
“We know that cultivated meat is the future of consumption and with this breakthrough, we’re well on our way to building that future,” concluded Luining.
In 2023 and beyond, Species Unite will continue to champion the solutions including cultivated meat that can help transition the world away from animal products. Join our community by becoming a member today and check out our Future of Food podcast episodes to learn more about cellular agriculture.
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Despite cultivated meat not being widely available yet, Florida has passed a law prohibiting the production and sale of the alternative protein, citing it as a threat to the state's agriculture.