We cannot talk about climate change without talking about how we produce our food, because agriculture contributes 19% of global greenhouse gases emissions. Cultured meat can play a vital role in making our food production more sustainable. In this guide, I ranked and reviewed the top 5 cultured meat startups in 2023.
- Prolific Machines
- Novel Farms
- Bluu Seafood
- Meatable
- SCifi Foods
Industrial animal agriculture is cruel. Go to YouTube and watch how animals are being bred in cramped, caged environments, and then slaughtered before ever having a chance to step out of their captivity, and you may be tempted to never eat meat again. The problem is, we LOVE meat. Meat is deeply rooted in every culture in the world since time immemorial.
On top of the cruelty factory farming entails, industrial animal agriculture is also really really bad for the planet. When we think of climate change, we usually think of factories and cars as the major contributors. However, one industry that is silently harming the planet is actually the meat industry. It takes 1,799 gallons of water to produce just 1lb of beef, and cattle farming is a major driver of global deforestation.
Cultured meat is also known as cultivated meat, or by the less appealing name lab-grown meat. Cultured meat is 100% real meat which is no different from the meat you get by slaughtering animals, because it is grown from cells from the animals themselves. Imagine growing a whole chicken, but instead of growing the chicken from an egg, you grow it with cells taken from another chicken. When you eat it, no pain is inflicted because it is just cells with no consciousness.
It is imperative not to confuse cultured meat with plant-based meat. Plant-based meat is food made from vegetarian or vegan ingredients, eaten as a replacement for meat. It may look, feel and taste like real meat, but its composition is different from real meat. There are other startups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods walking down this path, and they are equally noble.
What are the Top 5 Cultured Meat Startups in 2023?
My top picks are Prolific Machines, Novel Farms, Bluu Seafood, Meatable and SCifi Foods.
1. Prolific Machines
Prolific Machines is a biotech company working to reinvent how cells are made for a long-term, healthy future.. The company is based in California and has already raised Series A funding from renowned backers.
The goal of Prolific Machines is to create a biological assembly line that will enable the manufacture of cells at the lowest cost possible. The people at Prolific Machines believe they can mass create clean, carbon-free cultured meat that tastes just like meat we get from butchering animals by replicating what Ford accomplished for cars in food production.
Their mission is to “accelerate the transition to sustainable agriculture”, while their vision is to make cultured meat the primary source of animal protein. To do this, they have to make cultured meat at a price point that can compete with factory farming, and they believe they have just the solution to that.
Visit their website for more information.
2. Novel Farms
Based in California, Novel Farms develops cruelty-free, inexpensive and tunable scaffolds for the production of whole cuts of gourmet cell-based meat. As of October 2022, the company is at pre-seed stage.
Novel Farms employs microbial fermentation as its technology. To create full pieces of premium cultured meat, cells from the world’s noblest and most coveted animal breeds will be grown. Novel Farms’ goal is to create farmed meats that will be difficult to refuse in order to “bring gourmet delicacies into the future of food.” They will first attempt to raise normal pork, then Iberian pork, which is one of the most coveted and delicate meats in the world.
Visit their website for more information.
3. Bluu Seafood
Bluu Seafood is based in Germany and the startup is currently at seed stage. What makes them different from other cultured meat startups is that they focus solely on seafood, which is in fact a staple food in many regions of the world.
As a matter of fact, over 90% of wild fisheries are classified as overfished or harvested at maximum capacity. If current fishing trends continue, scientists predict that the oceans will be empty one day. The result would be catastrophic, because marine ecosystems are crucial to the planet.
It is estimated that three trillion marine animals are slaughtered per year and a huge amount of this is bycatch. By producing safe, healthy and GMO-free seafood using fish cells, we can greatly reduce this mass cruelty.
Then, there is also the issue of heavy metals and microplastics. These dangerous elements are the byproducts of heavy industries and after they enter the oceans, they are eaten by marine animals, which end up being eaten by us. The harmful elements then come a full circle and enter our body.
By switching to cultured seafood, we are saving the oceans by preventing overfishing, saving ourselves by preventing ingesting heavy metals and microplastics, and saving the marine animals by not slaughtering them.
Visit their website for more information.
4. Meatable
Meatable is a Dutch food production company that produces real and guilt-free meat. Based in the Netherlands, the startup is currently at Series A stage as of October 2022.
They are fundamentally altering the way the meat business affects both animal welfare and climate change with just one cell. They also improve food security while maintaining the enjoyment of eating succulent, authentic meat. They seek to sate the world’s desire for meat while minimising damage to the environment, humans, and animals.
They may finish the process in a matter of weeks as opposed to a cow’s three years to generate enough meat to be slaughtered.
Visit their website for more information.
5. SCifi Foods
Burgers made by SCiFi Foods, a food technology business, taste startlingly similar to traditional beef thanks to the combination of cultured meat and plant-based ingredients. The California-based firm, which has support from notable investors including Andreessen Horowitz, is now in the Series A stage as of October 2022. It was co-founded by CTO Kasia Gora, PhD, who has over ten years of experience leading R&D teams in bioengineering, and CEO Joshua March, a serial entrepreneur with two prior exits.
They have successfully produced beef cells in suspension using just a few cells and bioengineering techniques like CRISPR, which at scale will result in a 1000x reduction in production costs.
Visit their website for more information.
Summary
It is impossible to overestimate the advantages of cultured meat. Cultured meat is vastly more effective, cleaner, and less harmful to the environment. Cultured meat’s capacity to compete with conventional meat in terms of nutrition, flavour, consumer acceptance, sustainability, supply-chain resilience, and—most importantly—price will determine if it becomes popular and displaces conventional meat as the main source of protein. Cultured meat will never attain meaningful scale if we cannot bring down its price.
Accelerating the shift to sustainable agriculture is our goal. The transition of protein production systems to resilient, sustainable, and, potentially, animal-free expressions is supported by long-term demands related to the environment, land and water use, animal rights, public health, and food security.
I believe that many people will happily make the switch from conventional meat to cultured meat, if the price of the latter is cheaper than or at least on par with the former, and both taste exactly the same.