Today cultivated meat company Meatable announced it has raised $35 million in new funding.
This follows the July 5 news where the Dutch government, collaborating with Meatable and Mosa Meat and sector representative HollandBIO, successfully created a 'code of practice' to make tastings possible in controlled environments.
As regulatory hurdles clear, this is one of the first major investments the industry has seen in some time.
I spoke to Krijn de Nood, co-founder and CEO of Meatable, to learn more.
De Nood told me that the organisation created to implement the National Growth Fund plan, Cellular Agriculture Netherlands, will have responsibility for implementing the code of practice, including hiring a panel of experts to evaluate requests by companies to conduct tastings of cultivated meat and seafood.
"As soon as the panel is installed, we can allow consumers to taste and experience our products, and make our products even better with their feedback.
Our goal is to make tasty cultivated meat that is indistinguishable from traditional meat available to everyone, without harming people, animals or our planet. This development brings that goal closer."
From a 250k burger to a cultivated pork sausages that takes eight days to make
Coincidentally, this week is the 10-year anniversary of the first cultivated meat burger, and a project that Meatable's CTO Daan Luining contributed to back in 2013.
Meatable has just hit a major milestone with the ability to create cultivated pork sausages in only eight days – less than 5% of the time needed to rear a pig on a farm.
According to de Nood:
"This is truly a groundbreaking moment for us as a team.
Early research showed it was possible to create cultivated meat back in 2013.
But this was at an astronomical price, which would have been very difficult to scale unless everyone was a billionaire. Not to mention this was still using animal sources, which went against our principles as founders and as a company.
Over the past year, we have made real progress in developing a process that is efficient, scaleable, and produces products only of the highest quality."
The company is actively working towards price parity to offer products in the same price range as traditional meat, with de Nood noting, "We'll only have a positive impact on climate change if people can actually afford to buy our product."
Commercial products kick off in 2024
Meatable is launching its first commercial products in Singapore starting in 2024, with sausages and pork dumplings available in selected restaurants and retailers. It is partnering with the relevant authorities to secure regulatory approval.
The company is also on its way to expanding to the United States, with the USA approving two cultivated meat companies to start selling their products.
What kind of PR needs to happen to get people to eat cell meat at scale?
De Noord shared that the company is marketing its products to anyone concerned about eating traditional, industrially farmed meat:
"Cultivated meat will always be a dietary choice, just like any other. We are aiming to make that choice as self-explanatory as possible. We also know that education is essential. The more people know about cultivated meat, the more they are open to it and willing to try it.
The critical point here is that cultivated meat isn't 'like' meat - it is meat. It looks like, tastes like, and has the nutritional profile of traditional meat."
De Nood attributes the meatiness of their products to "patented opti-ox™ technology, combined with pluripotent stem cells (PSCs), that replicates the natural growth process of the cells and makes it possible to produce real muscle and fat cells, which are the two key ingredients that make meat taste like meat."
Earlier, Meatable invited industry and retail partners, including Classic Fine Foods Singapore (leading global fine food distributor), Little Farms (Singapore's freshest grocery), and the Singapore Economic Development Board, to try its cultivated pork sausage.
De Nood shared:
"The feedback was extremely positive, with tasters telling us they wouldn't have known it was cultivated meat!"
This funding brings the company's total funding so far to $95 million. Led by Agronomics, the successful close saw Invest-NL, a Dutch impact fund, join as a new investor, contributing $17 million.
The round also drew renewed support from existing investors, including BlueYard, Bridford, MilkyWay, DSM Venturing and Taavet Hinrikus (chairman and founder of Wise).
Jim Mellon, co-founder of Agronomics, shared:
"Meatable is one of the leading companies helping to transform the cultivated meat industry.
With 80 billion animals slaughtered annually for meat and 70 percent of the Amazon rainforest destroyed because of animal agriculture, there is a real need to find a solution that can provide meat at the scale needed to address a growing mass market."
According to Bastiaan Gielink, Senior Investment Manager at Invest-NL:
"At Invest-NL, we are genuinely excited about the pioneering endeavours undertaken by Meatable. Our pursuit for appropriate protein alternatives that further a sustainable and circular society remains ceaseless.
The breakthroughs achieved by Meatable have convinced us that they possess the know-how and team to make this potential a reality."
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