“An Israeli startup wants to replace chicken coops, barns and slaughterhouses with bioreactors to churn out cell-based meat for American diners,” reports Bloomberg:
Future Meat Technologies Ltd. is in talks with U.S. regulators to start offering its products in restaurants by the end of next year. The company has just opened what it calls the world’s first industrial cellular meat facility, which will be able to produce 500 kilograms (1,102 pounds) a day. “From the get-go, our main focus was around scaling up and reducing cost in order to have a commercially viable product,” Chief Executive Officer Rom Kshuk said in an interview… Since the first prototypes, startups have cut costs by 99% and if consumers take to these products, the market could reach $25 billion by 2030, McKinsey & Co. said in a report last week. But to compete with conventional meat, costs need to be slashed even further.
Future Meat Technologies, which has raised $43 million from investors including Tyson Foods Inc., Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. and S2G Ventures LLC, claims the lowest price for cultured chicken breast. It’s managed to cut the cost to $4 per 100 grams, a fraction of the original price, and plans to cut it by half again by the end of 2022, Kshuk said. The company’s facility, located in the Israeli city of Rehovot, can produce cultured chicken, pork, and lamb, with the production of beef coming soon. Still, it’s small compared with some conventional farm factories, some of which slaughter thousands of animals per day. The Good Food Institute said cultured meat production will need to reach millions of tons a year to progress from the demonstration to the industrial stage.
Future Meat will be able to “scale out” production lines and replicate the facility elsewhere, Kshuk said. It plans to target the U.S. market — which has some of the biggest meat consumption rates in the world — before expanding to Europe and China… “We are aiming to reduce the cost more, more and more,” the CEO said. “The story here is not to have a premium product. This is really about finding an alternative way to produce meat.”
Slashdot reader Beeftopia tipped us off to the story. The company claims in a press release that their platform “enables fast production cycles, about 20-times faster than traditional animal agriculture.”
“After demonstrating that cultured meat can reach cost parity faster than the market anticipated, this production facility is the real game-changer,” says Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, founder and chief scientific officer of Future Meat Technologies. “This facility demonstrates our proprietary media rejuvenation technology in scale, allowing us to reach production densities 10-times higher than the industrial standard. Our goal is to make cultured meat affordable for everyone, while ensuring we produce delicious food that is both healthy and sustainable, helping to secure the future of coming generations.”
The facility further supports Future Meat Technologies’ larger efforts to create a more sustainable future. The company’s cruelty-free production process is expected to generate 80% less greenhouse emissions and …read more
Source:: Slashdot