Aleph Farms Ltd. has kicked off the first cell-grown minute steak, delivering the full experience of meat with the appearance, shape, and texture of beef cuts.
The food tech start-up’s new product demonstrates its capabilities for growing different types of natural beef cells isolated from the cow into a fully 3-D structure similar to conventional meat. The breakthrough not only obtains the true texture and structure of beef muscle tissue steak, but also the flavor and shape, establishing a new benchmark in cell-cultured meat technology.
Aleph Farms successfully grown slaughter-free steak, without the need for devoting vast tracts of land, water, feed, and other resources to raise cattle for meat and uses no antibiotics.
Cell-grown meat is typically grown from a few cells of a living animal, extracted painlessly. These cells are nourished and grow to produce a complex matrix that replicates muscle tissue.
One of the barriers to grown meat production has been getting the various cell types to interact with each other to build a complete tissue structure as they would in the natural environment inside the animal. The challenge is to find the right nutrients and their combination that would allow the multicellular matrix to grow together efficiently, creating a complete structure. The company overcame this obstacle thanks to a bio-engineering platform developed in collaboration with the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa.
Aleph Farms was co-founded in 2017 by Israeli food-tech incubator The Kitchen, a part of the Strauss Group Ltd., and the Technion. The company is supported by US and European venture capital firms. Aleph Farms joined The RisingFoodStars—the European Institute of Technology (EIT) Food’s club of outstanding agrifood start-ups in July 2018.
