Advances in Cell-Based Meat Production
Interview with Eyal Rosenthal, CEO of Ever After Foods, Ltd.
At a time that the plant-based meat analog industry is currently passing through some growing pains, cell-based meat is encountering its own challenges. Funding took a precipitous dip last year—78% according to a recent analysis conducted by the venture capitalist group AgFunder, Inc. (although some companies were inoculated against that dip by significant injections of capital)—and bollards popped up in the form of regulatory hurdles and out-and-out bans on cell-based meat in countries such as Italy.
While the bans and regulatory issues are largely derived from those how make a living through animal husbandry, the investor flight can be attributed to the challenge of scale-up which seems to have taken far longer to solve than expected. Although some 150 companies out there are competing in the race to get cell-based meat to market, even those who have a successful bench product have found the cost to scale up without losing quality is still just too high. Remember the $300,000 cell-based hamburger from 2015?
This could all change soon. It looks as if Ever After Foods, Ltd., a food technology company in Israel has passed the tipping point in overcoming the barrier of scale-up in cell-based meat production. And they’ve done so by shifting the paradigm. According to Ever After CEO Eyal Rosenthal, the hang-up all along has been that cultivators of animal protein are using the same technology of large steel bioreactors which use mixers and stirrers that generate high mechanical stress, disrupting the animal cells and tissues. The result is unstructured slurries that need further manipulation rather than the creation of actual muscle meat.
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These are large reactors, some holding more than 20,000 liters or greater. Yet the yield from such giant reactors is only about one-tenth that of the original substrate. “It’s an extremely costly method,” says Rosenthal, who adds that the technology was adapted from the biopharmaceutical industry and built on a process that produces small volumes of high value product.”
Rosenthal went into cell-based meat cultivation with recognition that “innovation is needed to drive a production of cultivated meat that is more similar to the traditional meat.” Ever After’s technology eschewed the industry standard and is able to produce a high volume, so-far comparatively low cost product. The company’s system is designed to grow the natural animal stem cells in a manner that create complete and mature tissues, nurturing them instead of stressing them. They thrive in a matrix situated in a protected environment and that provides all the right nutrients that mimics the natural growth medium, complete with vitamins, minerals, amino acids, sugar, and salts. This creates whole tissues cultivated along proprietary edible scaffolds.
With Ever After having already proven its methods to be able to drop the cost of production of meat significantly, Rosenthal expects to have the technology refined to market scale in as little as the next year or two. As we look into the near future, it is increasingly realistic to assume that cultured animal is a matter of “when” and not “if,” especially because of the urgent need to address food security, health, animal welfare, and sustainability in a world where the demand for animal protein is rapidly outstripping the safe resources to support it.
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