August 8, 2023

 

Dutch startup secures $35 million for production and launch of cultivated pork

 

 

Dutch startup Meatable has raised $35 million in funding to scale the production and accelerate the commercial launch of its cultivated pork.

 

Bringing the total funding received by the company to $95 million, the announcement came a month after the company worked with Mosa Meat, HollandBIO and the Dutch government to create a 'code of practice' facilitating cultivated meat tastings in the Netherlands.

 

The Series B investment round was led by Agronomics; Invest-NL joins as a new investor, contributing $17 million. The scaling and optimisation of Meatable's manufacturing processes will help it become cost-competitive with conventional meat.

 

"Our pursuit for appropriate protein alternatives that further a sustainable and circular society remains ceaseless," said Bastiaan Gielink, senior investment manager at Invest-NL. "The breakthroughs achieved by Meatable have convinced us that they possess the know-how and team to make this potential a reality."

 

In October 2022, Meatable partnered with Singapore's ESCO Aster, the only regulator-approved contracted cultivated meat manufacturing facility in the world, in its bid towards achieving approval from the Singapore Food Agency. In May, it hosted its first cultivated meat tasting event in the city-state, with the goal of launching its pork sausages and dumplings in select restaurants and retailers in 2024.

 

Meatable co-founder and chief executive officer Krijn de Nood confirmed to Green Queen that the company will be looking to expand to the United States after its Singapore launch, before exploring other markets, depending on the regulatory processes. The US became just the second country to approve the sale of cultivated meat products in June, granting regulatory clearance to Upside Foods and Good Meat.

 

"In order to gain regulatory approval in the US, we're working with the relevant US experts and authorities on this matter – including the US Food and Drug Administration and the United States Department of Agriculture," said de Noord. "Our application in Singapore gives us useful points of reference as well."

 

To produce its cultivated pork, Meatable uses a proprietary technology called Opti-ox, eschewing the need for fetal bovine serum (FBS).

 

"To create Meatable's cultivated meat, our team first isolates a single animal cell, taken harmlessly from an animal. While immortalised cell lines are more commonly found in the industry, they require an alteration of the cells to allow them to multiply indefinitely," said de Nood.

 

The company's patented tech instead uses pluripotent stem cells (PSCs), which "have the natural ability to keep on multiplying and to do so rapidly" – and these double in just 24 hours. "The difficulty with using PSCs is that it can be more challenging to change them from stem cells into more specialised cells, such as muscle or fat," said de Nood. "However, by using these cells in combination with patented opti-o technology, we're able to produce real muscle and fat cells that are fully differentiated in just [eight] days." That's about 30 times faster than it takes to rear a pig for pork on the farm.

 

"This is coupled with a perfusion process that allows the team to work in a continuous cycle to generate very high cell densities. This means we can grow a lot of cells in our bioreactors and harvest cultured meat from the reactors continuously. This is a great step forward as it increases productivity and makes the process easy to scale.

 

"Altogether, this means that when it comes to making real cultivated meat, we have the tools to make the process extremely efficient and one that can scale to serve customers around the world."

 

- Green Queen