Hoxton Farms bets on cultivated fat as a sector narrows its ambitions. Hoxton Farms - based in White City, West London - is selling cultivated animal fat to processed-meat manufacturers as an ingredient, a narrower proposition than the lab-grown steaks the sector once promised, and one its co-founder argues is the realistic one. Writing in the Financial Times, Susannah Savage charts a sector recalibrating. Alternative protein companies raised more than $5bn in 2021 at the height of the climate-tech boom, according to the Good Food Institute; last year the figure was $881m, with cultivated meat and seafood companies attracting just $74m. The first cultivated products are now reaching market in the places where the price is easier to bear or the advantage simpler to explain - pet food, sushi counters, chocolate. Hoxton Farms has raised about $35m, submitted a regulatory dossier for cultivated pork fat in Singapore in late 2025 and has a partnership with Sumitomo Corporation in Japan, with co-founder Max Jamilly expecting first approval next year in east Asia, followed by the US. The logic of the fat-first strategy is that fat carries much of meat's taste and texture while being treated as an afterthought, and that its supply is volatile - Jamilly notes that the lean meat in a sausage and the fat in it may come from entirely different countries. A relatively small quantity of cultivated fat can therefore improve a much larger product, which is a far shorter route to commercial viability than growing a whole cut. Agronomics-backed Meatly is making a parallel bet in pet food, having raised £10.4m to build what it says will be Europe's largest cultivated meat facility. White City's research campus in West London has become a natural landing place for companies of exactly this shape - laboratory-heavy, capital-hungry, needing specialist space and proximity to academic engineering rather than a conventional office. The sub-region also holds one of the country's densest concentrations of food manufacturing, which is the customer base an ingredient business of this kind ultimately has to win. Those two things sitting a few miles apart is not a coincidence worth wasting. "The technology is there but it's technology to make better sausages, not brand new premium steaks." Max Jamilly, co-founder and chief executive of Hoxton Farms, quoted in the Financial Times

Mitsui Chemicals has invested in Hoxton Farms Ltd, a UK-based company developing cultivated fats for food products, through the 321FORCE Global Innovation Fund. Hoxton Farms uses molecular biology and machine learning to produce fats from stem cells, enhancing meat alternatives. Mitsui aims to collaborate with Hoxton Farms to scale up and commercialize these technologies across various fields, including food and cosmetics, to promote sustainable growth.