Dutch startup Meatable has slashed production times for cultivated pork from eight days to four days in recent months by dramatically speeding up the process by which its stem cells differentiate into fat and muscle, further improving its unit economics at a time when the industry is facing intense scrutiny. Speaking to AgFunderNews at the Future Food-Tech conference in San Francisco last week, cofounder and CTO Daan Luining acknowledged it was a challenging time for the cultivated meat industry with investment plunging last year, but noted that Meatable had secured the largest round ($35m series B) in the sector in 2023, taking its total funding to just under $100 million. “I think what we’re seeing is a natural cycle for all innovation, where you see hype, then stagnation, then consolidation, and then redirection,” said Luining, a biologist who cofounded Meatable in 2018 with stem cell biologist Dr. Mark Kotter and McKinsey exec Krijn de Nood. “But the companies with something unique and of value will stay because they have something worth investing in

With a 78% drop in funding in 2023, and two major players pausing plans to open large-scale commercial facilities in the near future, how will cultivated meat transition from a loss-making novelty served at a handful of high-end restaurants to a commercially viable alternative to animal agriculture?Speaking at a webinar hosted by The Good Food Institute this week, Dr. Elliot Swartz, principal scientist, cultivated meat, acknowledged that like all new industries, cultivated meat producers are stuck in something of a chicken-and-egg situation right now.Or as chemical engineer and engineering consultant Dr. Dave Humbird observed more bluntly last year, “None of this stuff makes any commercial sense until everyone’s eating it.”According to Swartz: “While costs for growth factors [pricy signaling proteins used in cell culture media for cultivated meat] are still high today, the bottleneck is one of markets, not technology: no single manufacturer is ready to purchase kilograms of FGF2, IGF1, or TGFb.“But suppliers by definition need to scale alongside the growth of the cultivated meat industry that they are serving. And this is inherently going to limit how fast certain costs can be reduced, because no one is going to invest the capital needed to create 100 large-scale facilities for growth factors [pricy signaling proteins used in some media formulations] if the industry really only needs to be serviced by five right now.”Meanwhile, he said: “The bulk of cellular biomass in proliferating cells is made from amino acids [which are used in basal media formulations for cultivated meat]. Today, amino acids used to feed cells come primarily from individual fermentation processes, only some of which are sufficiently scaled.”‘Cell density as a single metric doesn’t tell you the full story’He also acknowledged that much of the work on sourcing lower-cost alternatives to certain media components—for example non recombinant sources of albumin or amino acids such as plant protein hydrolysates—is still at the research stage.“Really everyone needs to know the answers to these questions, or else we’re going to see a lot of duplicative wasted research and efforts. So this is really one area that I think is ripe for publishing results, protocols and methods openly even if you’re a private company.“With that said, there’s also a big opportunity for these questions to be addressed through collaborative public private work through some of the consortiums that have been formed already in the cultivated meat industry, since these challenges are not easy to solve.”Overall, reducing media costs will come from economies of scale; switching from pharma to food-grade ingredients; finding cheaper sources of key media components such as albumin; and from developing more efficient cell lines that can thrive with fewer, less expensive inputs, said Swartz.And the latter is key, he said: “For example, cells can be engineered in various ways to eliminate the need for certain [expensive] growth factors such as FGF2, so I think you will see more and more genetic engineering and editing tools become incorporated into the process to address some of these scalability concerns.”“Millions of kg of albumin could be needed to supply less than 1% of global meat production volume.” Dr

Views about the current status of cultivated meat technology varied sharply at this year’s cellular ag innovation day at Tufts University, with industry skeptic Dr. Dave Humbird claiming it’s stuck at technology readiness level 3 and Ark Biotech founder Yossi Quint suggesting it’s “a lot further ahead than people think.”. While scores of companies have proved they can make cultivated meat in the lab, only a handful have progressed to pilot scale, where they are producing it at a loss. No one has yet produced it at large scale, and a shakeout is expected over the next 12 months as startups run out of money. Bringing down the cost of goods (COGS) will require optimizing cell culture media formulations, improving biomass yields, optimizing the bioprocess, and larger, but more affordable, bioreactors, Quint told delegates at the Jan. 11 event