“Current sentiment around cultivated meat includes skepticism regarding its scalability and market readiness, with concerns it may be more hype than a viable alternative,” says SuperMeat cofounder Ido Savir. “Our new report provides proof that with the right technology there is a commercially viable path to market.”
One of the earliest players in the sector founded in December 2015, Rehovot, Israel-based SuperMeat is growing embryonic avian stem cells—which are naturally immortal (they can replicate indefinitely) and can differentiate into multiple different cell types—to produce muscle and fat tissue.
The semi-continuous production process—outlined in a new 23-page report and video released today—features a unique method for isolating these cells from non-incubated, fertilized eggs.
Following expansion, adaptation for suspension growth (the cells grow in clusters and differentiate into fat and muscle without scaffolding), and cloning, the cells become “well-suited for large-scale bioreactor processes,” Savir told AgFunderNews.
“We’re providing a breakdown of the end-to-end process, conveying the main metrics and KPIs that one needs to look at, how to measure them, and explaining how they connect to the bottom line.”
“Supermeat’s ability to reach high cell densities within a short time frame coupled with rapid differentiation protocols marks a significant breakthrough in cultivated meat production. These technical advancements offer a glimpse into a future where cultivated meat can be produced at scale, providing a sustainable alternative to conventional meat.” SuperMeat
‘With the right technology there is a commercially viable path to market’
SuperMeat claims that with its current (10-liter) production set up scaled to 25,000-liter bioreactors, its cost of production would be $11.8 per pound without depreciation, and $13.4 per pound with depreciation for 100% cultivated chicken meat, costs that are “competitive with high-end conventional poultry products in the US,” claimed Savir.
This assumes animal-component-free media costs below 50 cents per liter and cell densities of 80 million cells per milliliter within nine days, said Savir, who is working with manufacturing partners and regulatory agencies in the US and Singapore with a view to setting up ‘mid-scale’ production to further validate its process to potential partners and investors.
With this initial production scale, said Savir, it would make sense to adopt a hybrid approach in which processed meat products such as mince and burgers were combined with cultivated chicken with a 30% inclusion rate.
“That would still allow us to be competitive in the value-added market,” claimed Savir, who is hoping to secure regulatory clearance in the US market “towards the end of next year.”
Investors are ‘understandably on the defensive’
Savir would not disclose how much SuperMeat has raised to date and said investors that have got their fingers burned in the foodtech space are “understandably on the defensive.” But if companies that have been careful with their money can provide hard evidence that the tech is commercially feasible and that there is a market, there is every chance that the industry could “explode again,” he argued.
“We’re not jumping ahead to [try and secure funding to] build a [large commercial-scale] plant, we’re working with partners to operate at mid-scale in a way that will involve almost no investment in capex, so we can show market interest and mitigate risk for investors and manufacturing partners.”
‘High yields at unprecedented speed’
To make its products, Supermeat is using a two-stage process.
First, cells are proliferated in a bioreactor before being progressively transferred to a second set of bioreactors with media that triggers them to differentiate into fat, muscle, and potentially other types of animal tissue, said Savir.
The differentiation bioreactors do not require scaffolding to enable the cells to form muscle or fat tissue, he said. “Our aggregates excrete their own ECM [extra-cellular matrix] related molecules to essentially create their own natural scaffolds. The burger you see in our video is 85% muscle and 15% fat with nothing added. The resulting muscle cells exhibit key characteristics of conventional meat, including the expression of myosin heavy chain and enhanced protein synthesis.”
SuperMeat’s cells have extremely high differentiation rates (95-100%) and are able to turn into fat (24-hours) and muscle (four days) very rapidly owing to the efficiency of the differentiation process, claimed Savir.
“One of the reasons many people maybe don’t use embryonic stem cells is because they have a relatively long process to differentiate into muscle or fat but we were able to achieve a differentiation process without genetic modification that is extremely rapid.”
Dr. Elliot Swartz, GFI: ‘My hope is that more companies will be inspired to share their own scaling strategies’
Asked for his take on SuperMeat’s report, Dr. Elliot Swartz, principal scientist, cultivated meat, at nonprofit The Good Food Institute (GFI), told AgFunderNews he was encouraged to see more cultivated meat companies “share empirical data and information about their processes and scale-up strategy.”
He added: “The process shows some similarities with the work published by Believer Meats earlier this year. Both processes use perfusion with tangential flow filtration to achieve high cell densities using low-cost media formulations with custom feeding and formulation strategies. They also both rely on continuous manufacturing. This suggests a similar philosophy toward scaling.
“We know through our industry survey that the approach to scale cultivated meat is not monolithic and current technoeconomic analysis (TEA) models do not account for all of the possible options. My hope is that more companies will be inspired to share their own scaling strategies, which will allow the field to evaluate tradeoffs and hone in on the most tractable paths forward.”
‘The cultivated meat field needs to collectively publish more of these data points’
One of the most important aspects of SuperMeat’s report is the data on differentiation, claimed Swartz. “To date, none of the current TEA studies have modeled the potential mass gained during differentiation. As shown by SuperMeat, even a short differentiation step can add significant amounts of mass to the product at the end of the production cycle, which can have large consequences on cost as well as end product quality and nutrition, as demonstrated by the increase in protein content in differentiated muscle cells.”
As to the ‘meatiness’ of SuperMeat’s chicken muscle, he said, “Myosin heavy chain is a reliable marker of differentiated skeletal muscle with reliable antibodies for detection. Together with the increased protein content and accelerated development timelines in chickens compared to humans, the data are believable.”
Overall, he said, the study provides “optimistic cost projections alongside important new data points from cells used in cultivated meat production, including yields, doubling times, process strategy, control of metabolites, and mass gain during differentiation.
“The cultivated meat field needs to collectively publish more of these data points to create more robust cost and environmental impact models that can be used to educate and inform stakeholders. GFI is working to rapidly collect these data via a survey released earlier this week.”
Cultivated meat: Where are we now?
The three best-funded cultivated meat startups are UPSIDE Foods ($608m), GOOD Meat ($270m), and Believer Meats ($388m).
UPSIDE has hit pause on plans to build a large-scale facility in Chicago and is instead focusing on expanding its smaller ‘EPIC’ site in California, while GOOD Meat is “not attempting to raise money for a large-scale cultivated meat facility right now” and is instead focusing on process development and more efficient cell lines.
However, Believer Meats, which is building what it claims is the world’s largest cultivated meat facility in North Carolina, has said it expects the site to be “operational by the end of 2024,” although it has not yet secured regulatory approvals to sell cultivated meat products in the US.
Dutch startup Mosa Meat, which raised $43 million earlier this year, opened a 30,000sq ft ‘scale-up plant’ in Maastricht last year, while fellow Dutch player Meatable secured the largest round ($35m series B) in the sector in 2023, taking its total funding to just under $100 million.
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