Israeli company Future Meat Technologies has opened what it claims to be the world's first industrial cultured meat facility. The startup is following a hybrid approach of using cultured and herbal ingredients.
With the capability to produce 500 kilograms of cultured products a day, equivalent to 5,000 hamburgers, this facility makes scalable cell-based meat production a reality, the company says. "This facility opening marks a huge step in Future Meat Technologies' path to market, serving as a critical enabler to bring our products to shelves by 2022," says Rom Kshuk, CEO of Future Meat Technologies. "Having a running industrial line accelerates key processes such as regulation and product development."
Production of cultured chicken, pork and lamb
Currently, the facility can produce cultured chicken, pork and lamb, without the use of animal serum or genetic modification (non-GMO) with the production of beef coming soon. According to the company, its technologies' platform enables fast production cycles, about 20-times faster than traditional animal agriculture. The company's proprietary technology is based on the rapid natural proliferation of connective tissue cells growing in stainless steel fermenters that continuously remove waste products to maintain a constant physiological environment.
Future Meat Technologies says it is the only company to be able to produce cultured chicken breasts for $3.90 per 100 grams, and, as it continues to scale up its operations, it expects those costs to fall even further. The plan is to cut it by half by the end of 2022, the CEO said according to Bloomberg.
In contrast to other companies in the clean meat sector, Future Meat uses a mixture of cultured and herbal ingredients for its products instead of just using one of these basic ingredients. According to Kshuk, it is essential that hybrid products usually get onto the market faster than others. Future Meat would like to use “the best of both worlds”, even if the emphasis will shift more towards exclusively cultured meat products in the future.
Production facility as a game changer
"After demonstrating that cultured meat can reach cost parity faster than the market anticipated, this production facility is the real game-changer," says Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientific officer of Future Meat Technologies. "This facility demonstrates our proprietary media rejuvenation technology in scale, allowing us to reach production densities 10-times higher than the industrial standard. Our goal is to make cultured meat affordable for everyone, while ensuring we produce delicious food that is both healthy and sustainable, helping to secure the future of coming generations."
The facility further supports Future Meat Technologies' larger efforts to create a more sustainable future. The company's cruelty-free production process is expected to generate 80% less greenhouse emissions and use 99% less land and 96% less freshwater than traditional meat production. Still, the proposed volumes of meat production is still small compared with some conventional farm factories, some of which slaughter thousands of animals per day. The Good Food Institute said cultured meat production will need to reach millions of tons a year to progress from the demonstration to the industrial stage.
Market entry envisioned for 2022
Future Meat Technologies aims to reach shelves in the United States in 2022 and is currently in the process of approving its production facility with regulatory agencies in multiple territories. The company is eyeing several locations in the United States for its projected expansion. Future Meat Technologies was founded in 2018 and has raised $43 million from investors. The last investment round brought in $26 million with new investors such as German dairy producer Müller, ADM capital and CPG Richt Products Corp. Existing investors such as Tyson Foods, Archer Daniels Midland, S2G Ventures and Bits x Bites have participated as well.
Globally, the market for cell-based meat is accelerating and more and more companies try to scale up its technologies. Whereas European companies such as Mosa Meat or Meatable are on its way to also start building up their first industry-scale production facilities, US-based company Eat Just Inc. became the first company to sell cell-grown chicken in a restaurant in Singapore. Since the first prototypes, startups have cut costs by 99% and if consumers take to these products, the market could reach $25 billion by 2030, McKinsey & Co. said in a recent report. But to compete with conventional meat, costs need to be slashed even further.