🎥Hoxton Farms tackles fat, the final frontier for alt meat

[Disclosure: AgFunderNews’ parent company AgFunder is an investor in Hoxton Farms]

Founded by synthetic biologist Dr. Max Jamilly and mathematician and computer scientist Ed Steele in 2020, Hoxton Farms is one of a handful of startups developing fats for meat alternatives, a hot area of development in the alternative protein space with applications in plant-based and cultivated meat.

While some players in the field are engineering microbes to produce animal-like fats and others are structuring fats using microencapsulation or oleogelation, Hoxton Farms is growing animal fat from animal cells in bespoke bioreactors.

“Meat alternatives don’t taste good enough, and it’s the key reason that consumers don’t repeat purchase,” Jamilly told AgFunderNews at the SynBioBeta conference in San Jose last week. “Key to fixing that disappointment is fat. If you can’t get the fat right, it’s impossible to recreate the experience that meat eaters crave.

“And, of course, there are many other advantages to fat too [in the cellular ag space]. It’s a lot more scalable than muscle and it grows faster.”

In our conversation, we discussed:

• The problem with the current fats & oils toolkit for meat alternatives.
• Do alt meat makers want to compromise their plant-based credentials by adding animal fat to their products?
• How does making cultivated fat compare to growing muscle cells in a bioreactor?
• Wouldn’t it be cheaper/easier to make animal-like fats via other methods, including precision fermentation?
• How is Hoxton Farms de-risking the scaleup process?
• How is Hoxton Farms optimizing its media formulations, and where does AI and ML come in?
• Scaling out vs scaling up.
• Which cell lines is the company using and why?
• The latest on capacity, regulatory pathways, and the go to market strategy.

Further reading:

Crunch time for cultivated meat: ‘Probably 70-90% of players will fail in the next year’