The promise of cultured meat
In this article an interview with Krijn de Nood, the CEO and co-founder of cultured meat startup Meatable. The need will be catch up TNW conferencewhat takes place on 15 & 16 June in Amsterdam. If you’d like to join the event (and say hello to our editors!), we’ve got something special for our loyal readers. Use the promotional code READ-TNW-25 and receive a 25% discount on your business pass for TNW Conference. See you in Amsterdam!
As a vegetarian I have tried the whole range of plant-based meat substitutes for the past 13 years. And let me tell you, the texture and flavor have come a long way since the early 2010s. Developers and restaurants have become aware of the fact that just because someone chooses not to eat meat for environmental or ethical reasons, doesn’t mean they don’t want the satisfying experience of a juicy, umami-rich burger or hot dog.
Meanwhile, it’s understandable that for a hardcore meat lover, a seitan steak just isn’t going to cut it. But whether you’re a committed omnivore or not, there’s no denying that our current food production systems of ranching and ranching are unsustainable.
Think of cultured meat and the companies that are working to get it on the shelves of our supermarkets in the next ten years.
Krijn de Nood is one of the founders of Meatable, a Delft food tech startup that grows meat in a lab – without harming animals. The company has recently held the first public tasting of its pork sausage in Singapore, and looks to be cost competitive with corresponding organic conventional meat products in a few years.
First of all, let’s state what cultured meat is not; it is not vegan or plant based. It is real animal flesh from stem cells, taken from a live animal, that has been grown and fed with nutrients in a bioreactor to allow them to grow.
Another possible misconception surrounding the technology is an underestimation of how complex the process is. De Nood: “It all goes a lot slower than building a new app, for example. It is not exactly the same, but it is closer to developing a new vaccine or a new medicine, for example.”
End unnecessary suffering
A staggering 70 billion land animals are slaughtered each year around the world. That’s almost 200 million a day. And the world’s hunger for meat continues to grow along with population and GDP.
By 2050, global meat consumption is expected to increase by 70%. While Meatable and its peers/competitors cannot reasonably be expected to replace the entire conventional meat industry, by 2035 the company hopes to cumulatively save an estimated 27 million animal lives.
As De Nood explains some of his reasons for leaving a business career at McKinsey and co-founding Meatable in 2018: the fact that we are no longer so dependent on animals for our food, I think that is a life will be very well spent.”
Sustainability
When it comes to environmental impact, 14.5% of all man-made greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to livestock farming. In contrast, aviation is responsible for about 2.5%.
In addition to carbon dioxide, meat production also contributes to methane and nitrous oxide emissions. While the latter two do not linger in the atmosphere as long as CO2their global warming potential is between 25 and 300 times higher.
We’re so committed to continuing to raise cows for meat and dairy that an Australian startup called Rumin8 that makes a methane-reducing feed additive (basically causes cows to burp less) has launched a Investment of 12 million dollars of Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), founded by Bill Gates.
There have been preliminary reports questioning how ecologically sustainable it is to grow meat in a lab. However, De Nood says that comparisons between the current carbon intensity of cultured meat and conventional livestock farming are not entirely fair. This is because it measures how much energy it takes to produce lab-grown meat today, not how much it will need once it reaches an industrial scale.
“If you look at the research process, it will always be the case that to make one electric car, for example, you need a lot of infrastructure. And if you attribute all that to one electric car, that electric car will not be any better than the car that comes from an industrial normal car manufacturer.”
De Nood explains that if we look at Meatable’s life cycle analysis (LCA), the farmed beef can become about 97% less polluting than conventionally raised cattle, and the pork about 80% less polluting. Of course, given that the company manages to scale up its technology.
Scales of cultured meat
Pigs are by far the most slaughtered animal in the world, which is one of the reasons why Meatable decided to develop its pork products first, although a dedicated “beef team” is also involved in raising beef. The cells themselves behave a little differently, meaning that nutrient uptake needs to be optimized for each species individually. However, when it comes to scaling up to larger bioreactors, the process is very similar.
As mentioned, Meatable held its first public tasting in Singapore, where it hopes to bring its first industrial facility online in 2026. For that to happen, a lot has to be scaled up, something that De Nood attributes to a classic R&D process. “We know that it works on a small scale, now the question is whether we can apply it on an industrial scale.”
One of the most important aspects of scaling up production is achieving efficiency without compromising on quality and safety. And Meatable is well on its way, given its recent breakthrough. Yesterday, the company revealed that it can now grow pork in just eight days (less than 5% of the time it takes to keep a pig on a farm), with the highest quality muscle and fat cells.
This is essential to produce the true taste and texture of meat, one of the three most important metrics for bringing the technology to scale, according to de Nood.
“For example, cell densities are very important. So if you have a gallon of bioreactor capacity, how many grams of meat can you grow? The second is, what is the doubling time? So how long does it take for the cells to duplicate themselves? And the third one that’s really important is we start with stem cells. Stem cells are not as tasty as muscle and fat cells. So we have to change them. How many days does that process take?”
Apparently, just over a week now, Meatable’s use of pluripotent stem cells (PSCs), which naturally have the ability to multiply rapidly (with a doubling time of several days), and the company’s patented opti-ox technology.
Reduce costs
One of the biggest challenges for the nascent cultured meat industry is the cost associated with the technology. The very first lab-grown burger was produced in 2012 for a whopping $375,000 (€347,000). Indeed, one of Meatable’s founders and currently the company’s CTO, Daan Luining, did an internship on the project.
What happened to the price tag ten years later? While the exact number is not disclosed, de Nood says Meatable’s is now “more than a thousand times” lower than the original.
The company is looking at a small-scale launch of its products – a pork sausage and dumpling – in Singapore next year. After opening its production facility in the city-state, Meatable says its products will become cost-competitive with, say, organic sausages in the US and Asia, with retail prices around $20-25 per kilo. By the early 2030s, de Nood hopes the company can match the price of traditional meat.
Why Singapore?
This year, the company will open the Future of Meat innovation center together with Asia’s first plant-based butcher Love Handle, where the two will work on the development of hybrid meat products. But why Singapore? The Singapore Food Agency (SFA) became the first in the world to approve cultured meat for consumption in late 2020 when it gave the go-ahead for Eat Just chicken nuggets.
In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) followed suit last November and also removed farmed chicken from Upside Foods for the first time. Essentially, the decisions of the two food safety administrations create more certainty for startups to operate within their jurisdictions.
Europe, or specifically the EU, has an extremely lengthy regulatory process due to the decision-making processes of the union. There is hope for the block, because de Nood states that there are “many people”, especially in the Netherlands, who want to make it happen.
In April 2022, the Dutch government has indeed allocated 60 million tonneso develop a national ecosystem for cellular agriculture. And this is just the first step towards funding a larger growth plan with €252 to €382 million for the sector. Earlier this year, the House of Representatives also voted in favor of testing cultured meat in controlled settings.
Are consumers ready?
Well, apparently it depends – mostly on age. “If you talk to people 20 to 30 years old and younger, it’s a good idea. They are very climate conscious and have grown up with technology; technology is part of their lives,” says de Nood. “So 10 years from now, those people will be 40 and under, and those will be the ones with young children making the purchasing decisions. That is why I am very positive about consumer perception.”
For those wondering if lab-grown meat is natural or even ethical, De Nood says Meatable wants to flip the story, which is why the company coined the term “new natural.”
De Nood explains: “Well, is it normal for the rainforest to be cut down to sow soybean plantations that are shipped to the Netherlands to feed our livestock? If at some point you have the choice between a burger or a sausage, or in a few years a steak, the first of which involved slaughtering an animal, which was very bad for the environment, and the second, which is exactly the same was, none of those things were necessary, would you still go for that first one?
Krijn de Nood is one of many tech stars speaking at the TNW conference on June 15 and 16. Use the promo code READ-TNW-25 and receive a 25% discount on your business pass for TNW Conference.
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