Cultivated meat leader Meatable achieves landmark breakthrough

Dive Brief:

• Meatable, a Dutch food technology company today announced it has reduced in half the production time to produce cultivated meat — from eight days to four — which the company said is now the fastest in the industry. 
• Using its core patented Opti-Ox technology, Meatable is able to use less labor, energy, infrastructure, ingredients and water, making it all the more closer to the “commercialization of Meatable’s technology and large-scale production of cultivated meat products more broadly,” according to the announcement.
• The announcement comes a month after the company hosted a tasting of its cultivated pork sausage in Singapore, where Meatable aims for its products to reach the mass market with an expected restaurant launch later this year.

Dive Insight:

Since its full USDA approval last year, the cultivated meat industry has faced barriers of high production costs to reach the mass market. Scalability has been a barrier to growth in the industry.

But with its new technology, Meatable says it can make a significant dent in that barrier with a much faster — and cheaper — production time. 

Meatable said its breakthrough will be able to get its product to cost parity with animal-based meat. The technology cuts cell differentiation time in half, according to the release. This process now requires nearly half as many bioreactors at scale, cutting costs and enabling more efficient use of production space.

“What we envision this to look like is a continuous stream of cells being produced in one phase of the production process, and then turned into muscles very efficiently. So the fewer days you need to keep the cells alive and in a tank, the less capital expenditure and operating expenditure is needed in the entire process,” said co-founder and chief technology officer Daan Luining in an interview with Food Dive. 

The company said its process delivers a product of superior flavor and mouthfeel, as it can differentiate cells into real fat and muscle tissues, achieving the right level of fiber formation, protein, fat accumulation, and key meat flavors in only four days — which is about 60 times faster than the time it takes for farmers to rear a pig for pork and significantly faster than other cultivated meat processes.

The cultivated meat industry has not seen much movement since last year. Upside Foods, another pioneer in the space, even ceased its partnership with San Francisco restaurant Bar Crenn in February. China Chilcano, a Washington, D.C. restaurant that had partnered with Eat Just in the past, no longer serves the company’s cultivated meat products either.

The space is also no stranger to controversy. In recent months, legislators across states have introduced laws to prohibit the sale of the alternative protein, but proponents of the namesake product say their tactics are unconstitutional.

Luining said Meatable will eventually set its sights on the U.S. market, but for now the company is focused on gaining consumer feedback along with a restaurtant launch in Singapore later this year.

“This will be the first time we introduce our products to the public, and this is a big change for a company,” said Luining. “This is why we are focused on Singapore because it’s rather small and doesn’t produce any food itself, so we have a unique opportunity to introduce our product and get feed back consumers like if they like it, how they interact with it and what the production process looks like throughout all of that.”

Once the company is able to take all of its learnigns from Singapore, it will then head back to the drawing board and decide on next steps to “get its boots on U.S. soil,” said Luining. Long term, Meatable eventually wants to get into retail which will require a much larger production volume. “That will all happen over time, but first we need to learn more about what consumers want,” he said.