Eat Just To Scale Up Cultured Meat Production On Gaining New Regulatory Approval In Singapore

Global food tech company Eat Just Inc.’s cell-cultured meat division, Good Meat, will significantly scale up production after its serum-free media gained regulatory approval by the Singapore Food Agency (SFA), on track to reach price parity with conventional meat by 2027.

Serum, or in layman’s terms, the fluid component of blood, is traditionally used in bioreactors to cultivate animal cells until they differentiate into the skeletal muscle, fat, and connective tissues, yet removing it from production to achieve better cost efficiency has been a major technical hurdle for cultured meat manufacturers, according to Josh Tetrick, CEO of Eat Just.

“It’s more cost effective to use amino acids, sugar and salt without any serum,” Tetrick recently said during an exclusive interview, “and we can produce more meat at scale.”

What Qualifies ‘Scale’ In Cultured Meat Production?

Cultured meat has become a hot-button topic since Dutch pharmacologist, Mark Post, unveiled the world’s first cell-based vitro burger in 2013. On one hand, believers argue it could be an advanced solution to restoring biodiversity, while dramatically reducing carbon emissions from traditional animal farming; naysayers claim scalability will remain a long-term challenge since building vessels, the bioreactor for growing cells, is expensive and it demands significant amount of electricity, coupled with mixed consumer feedback on the actual flavor, texture, and nutrition of the product.

“When we talk about ‘scale,’ we’re talking about 40-plus million pounds, sufficient to achieve national distribution across the U.S.,” Tetrick explained, which is why Good Meat is installing larger vessels in a new facility to keep up with its future demand.

The facility, supported by an investment of over $100 million, will house what Good Meat claims to be the single-largest bioreactor in the cultivated meat industry to date: a 6,000-liter vessel built in partnership with bioreactor technology company ABEC, Inc. The plant, which will be running the company’s serum-free formulation process, is slated to open in later 2023.

A key determinant for manufacturing capacity is cell density — more stem cells a vessel contains, more meat can be produced during the given period of time. Good Meat’s main competitor, Israel-headquartered Believer Meats, recently claimed to have achieved a production density of 100 billion cells per liter. That, coupled with their medium that costs less than $5 per liter, cuts average projected costs of cultivated meat three-fold, the company’s founder, Professor Yaakov Nahmias, was quoted saying.

Good Meat will drive their serum-free media cost further down from the current $1 per liter to “tens of cents,” according to Tetrick, allowing the company to produce “hundreds of thousands of pounds” of cultivated meat. “Our next phase is to install vessels north of 100,000 liter each, which will enable tens of millions of pounds,” he told me, “but that won’t be up and ready until late 2024.”

Since Singapore became the first country in the world to allow the commercial sale of cultivated meat in 2020, Good Meat has started selling its chicken nuggets and breasts across local fine dining restaurants and street food vendors. It also recently teamed up with family-owned Huber’s Butchery, where dishes such as Good Meat cultivated chicken salad with cilantro lime dressing, are selling around SG$18.5, about $14.

“We lose money when we sell, but we’re also not selling a lot,” Tetrick said, “so it’s not like we’re burning a lot of cash.”

Little Regulatory Hurdles Remain In The U.S.

Removing serum is only the first step to reduce manufacturing cost for cell meat, and the growth factors used to replace the commonly used fetal bovine serum can be equally expensive, according to Joshua March, CEO of California-based SCiFi Foods.

“We are skeptical that the cost of producing growth factors can be reduced significantly enough for cultivated meat to get to cost parity with conventional meat, at least in the near term,” March wrote me via email. “Instead, we are using CRISPR [a non-GMO process] to engineer our cell lines to grow without the need for added growth factors, dramatically reducing the cost of cell culture media.”

Already growing cells in a serum-free bioreactor process, SCiFi Foods is in the process of getting its 500-liter pilot plant operational, and is aiming for 10 million cells/ml and a cost of $10 per burger by the end of this year.

In the U.S., where the FDA and the USDA co-established an agreement in 2019 to divide oversight authority for the cultured meat sector, Upside Foods, which is backed by Bill Gates, and valued at more than $1 billion, is the only company so far that has passed the FDA pre-market consultation process. The next steps for the San Francisco-based company are to work with the USDA on labeling and inspection.

Uma Valeti, Upside Foods’ CEO, said: “We have multiple serum-free media formulations for our products. We also have certain products which require a small amount of animal components, which we will be removing as we advance.

“Our production capacity at EPIC (Engineering, production and innovation center) is up to 50,000 pounds of cultivated chicken products annually. We also designed this facility for innovation and engineering, so we will be using its capacity flexibly as needed to advance our core technologies.”

As little regulatory hurdles remain ahead, manufacturers unanimously anticipate cultured meat to finally become available on American consumers’ plates this year. “We will be selling [in the U.S.] in 2023,” Tetrick said. “We’re going to start with internationally acclaimed chef José Andrés’ restaurants, and then enter channels similar to what we’ve done in Singapore.”