A Synthetic Food Future
How ESG, pollution, and investors may radically change the way we feed the planet.
Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles.
Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content.
Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory.
And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.
Will the future’s biggest meat producers have no animals?
Will the future’s biggest farms have no fields?
Radical Changes are Coming
Food is the ultimate subscription product. Most of us eat a few times per day.
The current investor class sees an opportunity to make great changes in our food system, and to make great profits in the process. In return, they promise a product that they claim is cleaner to the environment and safer for your consumption.
This (so-far) quiet transition has the potential to shake up economies and societies around the world.
Problems with the Current Paradigm
Our current relationship with food is clearly not working.
Obesity is increasing.
Malnutrition is increasing. (Many of us are “overfed and undernourished”)
People are even getting shorter, likely due to processed foods.
And we are destroying our environment and water supplies around the world to perpetuate the current flawed system.
Foods are now contaminated in ways we never imagined. Fish in the ocean are not clean. Fish from lakes have PFAS. Even “GMO free, steroid free, hormone free, antibiotic free” beef from small farms in rural America can be filled with PFAS.
And don't think that becoming vegan will solve your worries with contamination. Microplastics are finding their way into carrots and other root vegetables. Now that testing is more widespread, popular bottled juices are being found to contain PFAS. Even strawberries and asparagus in small rural farms are being found with dangerous levels of the dreaded forever chemicals.
The Synthetic Substitutes
Synthetic foods are no longer science fiction. This nascent industry is still coalescing on names like “cellular agriculture” or “precision fermentation” to describe these lab-grown creations. Whatever you call it, the industry leaders don't want you to call it “fake” or “unnatural”. Despite using innovations like immortalized stem cells or genetically modified bacteria to create their products, they often insist on calling them simply “meat”, “milks”, or “fats”1.
So what exactly are these new synthetic foods? The Good Food Institute, a group that was created to boost this developing field, says that, “cultivated meat, also known as cultured meat, is genuine animal meat (including seafood and organ meats) that is produced by cultivating animal cells directly”. Calling something created in a bioreactor “genuine animal meat” is a bold claim. It will be interesting to see what relevant food safety bodies around the world (like the USDA) end up saying about this.
So what does it mean to “[cultivate] animal cells directly”?
Most of us have experience with living things that replicate for edible purposes. We culture things like milk to make cheese, sourdough to make breads, grape juice to make wine, and tea to make kombucha. In these processes, some sort of specialized bacteria consumes something (like a sugar) and produces something (like alcohol) as an output. The process of “precision fermentation” uses genetically modified bacteria that produce outputs like lactose (a milk sugar) or casein (a milk protein). There is a similar process that the industry calls “cellular agriculture”, where immortalized stem cells (in the case of cows, these can come from fetal bovine serum) are induced to grow into the muscles that we are used to eating.
Unlike the traditional food system, producers in this emerging food paradigm don’t need to worry about issues like working with live animals (behavior, feed, sicknesses, seasonality, etc), transportation across long distances, seasonal workers, cold storage, microplastics, contaminated ground or rainwater and more.
Sounds pretty good, right?
Here is a list of some of the major players in the space. There are new teams and investments popping up all the time now so this list is not exhaustive.
Supporting this blog will help me create and maintain an up-to-date and searchable reference of this emerging industry.
Finished Products
Meats
This is an Israeli company that gained attention for making the first “3d-printed ribeye”. They describe themselves as “Steak Done Right. Sustainable, Cultivated Steaks”. They recently opened a US headquarters in New York City's Meatpacking District, and they are working to get approval to enter the US market. Investors include Leonardo DiCaprio and Cargill.
Formerly “Future Meat”. They are also from Israel, but they have a big US presence, because they are actively lobbying for acceptance with the USDA and are preemptively working with food manufacturers. They also recently announced plans for a $120 million plant in North Carolina, which will make it the largest cultivated meat facility in the world.
Formerly Hampton Creek. This company was founded in the Bay Area by Josh Tetrick, whose background in Africana studies and law school make him an interesting founder. Him and and his animal rights activist friend Josh Balk were certainly interesting to investors like Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Li Ka-Shing and the Qatar Investment Authority.
Eat Just is the biggest player in this space. They were established by looking for plant-based substitutes for eggs in products like mayonnaise, salad dressing, and cookie dough. They were the first company to gain approval and sell cultured chicken products in Singapore and they are currently building Asia's largest cultured meat facility in Singapore. They have also received a 200 million dollar investment from a few venture firms in Qatar to build a facility in Doha. They pitch their product as a way for countries that are reliant on food imports to produce locally, and they are appealing to places with limited land and/or resources.
This is Eat Just’s brand in Singapore. “GOOD Meat is real meat made without tearing down a forest or taking a life.” This will be the label under which the newly approved cultivated chicken will be sold.
This is a French team that is working on lab-grown foie gras.
This is another Bay Area company that is looking to make cellular cultivated pork. According to their website, “Mission Barns products contain real meat, without harming a single animal. A small sample from a pig is grown in a cultivator that mimics the animal’s body. Then, it’s combined with plant protein so you can enjoy Mission Barns meat.” Their first products are sausages that have plant-based protein and their proprietary pork fat.
This Bay Area company, formerly known as New Age Meats, is looking to make cellular grown pork. Given the recent news of them letting go of their pilot facility in Alameda, it is hard to tell what their future is.
Primeval Foods came out of a venture lab in London called Ace Ventures that invests in animal alternatives. They are interested in producing products like cultivated tiger meat. The founder says that “At the end of the day, we will see both cultivated, plant-based, fermentation-based, and traditional meat in the market, but I believe traditional ones will have the tiniest share”. Their website states that “Cultured meat is the "real deal." Cultured meat isn't a plant-based substitute, it is exactly the same as a non-cultivated one, but instead of slaughtering a whole animal, we produce the meat by growing animal cells.”
Formerly MeaTech. They are also from Israel, and currently working on cellular cultivated beef, pork, and fish products. They are currently traded on the NASDAQ as STKH. You can see their 100 gram printed steak from the end of 2021 in this video. One of their competitive advantages is their printing technology, which they are using to make their “Omakase Beef Morsels.”
SuperMeat is an Israeli company that focuses on making cultured chicken. They are actively lobbying in the US, Europe, and Asia, and looking for sites in the US to begin production.
The Bay Area company formerly known as “Memphis Meats” was founded by cardiologist Uma Valeti. In November, they received the first GRAS (Generally Regarded as Safe) review from the USDA for their chicken product, which is a huge step towards these foods becoming sold in the United States.
Seafood
This is an Israeli company that is working on producing cell-cultured tilapia products.
This is an Israeli company that is working on producing cell-cultured eel products for the Japanese market.
This is an Israeli company that is working on the precursors for the other cellular fish products. Their CEO explains a bit more about them in this video
This is an Israeli company that is working with Tufts University in the US to make cultivated fish viable in the US.
This is a Bay Area company that is “reinventing seafood”. They are developing a salmon product that they describe as “fresh fish without the microplastics, mercury, parasites, and other toxins commonly found in seafood today”.
Milk
Their “whey protein is a flora-based replication of the bovine-based β-lactoglobulin protein. It is made from the fermentation of the genetically modified trichoderma reesei yeast strain. After the yeast ferments, the protein is extracted via the aid of a centrifuge and then combined with water and fat to create a milk-like product for use in dairy products.”
The founders (Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi) described their product as a “more climate-proof, future-proof way of creating nutrition that’s reliable for people”.
They are targeting the B2B market. Milk powder is used in all kinds of processed foods, and it is easier to substitute than a glass of milk for drinking plain. Some cuisines, such as Indian, are accustomed to using it directly.
Remilk is an Israeli company that is working to enter the US market. On their site, they say that, “dairy crafted Remilk's way is healthy and clean, with no cholesterol, lactose, hormones, and antibiotics – just 100% yum without the scum! It’s identical in taste, requires a fraction of the resources and is 100% cruelty-free. Holy cow!”. It is interesting that they are not simply replicating real milk, but advertising something that they claim to be an improvement.
Wilk is another Israeli company that is working on cell-cultured yogurts, with a focus on their product that replicates milk fat. Their url, www.wilkismilk.com, directly makes the claim that their product is indeed, “milk”.
Honey
They describe themselves as “Honey made without bees”. MeliBio is an Oakland, California company. I actually tasted this at an expensive food industry event. They will be released to the public in Europe in early 2023, with a label that describes the product as a “plant based honey”. Raw honey can occasionally contain Clostridium botulinum, which can put infants and immunocompromised people at risk for honey-borne botulism. Since the product does not have a wild, environmental component, MeliBio says that their product will be “safe for new moms and babies”.
This is an Israeli company that is currently working to enter the US market. The YouTuber Nas describes them as “The World's Cleansest Honey”. They are able to make honey from any plants they receive pollen from.
Coffee
Yes. Even coffee is finding a number of companies looking to replace the bean. The idea of growing the coffee beans, picking them, processing them, shipping them, and roasting them can seem like a superfluous amount of environmental cost and human labor to the modern food scientist. Why not go directly from simpler inputs2 and use precision fermentation to get a similar output?
The labor aspect cannot be overstated - picking coffee is hard and skilled work. Seasoned coffee pickers in Central America are increasingly opting to try a difficult journey to the US instead of working another season in the fields, and children are having to fill in the gaps.
Seattle, home to Starbucks and countless other coffee companies, has a precision fermented coffee startup that is looking to create all the wonderful notes and experiences of coffee with “upcycled date seeds and a blend of other ingredients (such as grape, chicory, and tea derived caffeine)”. I have tasted their cold drink and it is certainly passable as an energy drink. Chicory has a long history of use as a coffee substitute in Europe and the United States, and date seeds are used as both a substitute and enhancer in the Gulf countries. I am sure there will be an interesting discussion over what can be legally called “coffee” over the next few years, just as we have seen with milk.
Formerly Compound foods, this coffee replacement was created by Maricel Saenz of Costa Rica, who saw how coffee plantations destroyed the local environment. Their product is “is roasted, fermented and brewed just like, well coffee! Instead of beans, [they] roast upcycled ingredients, roots, seeds and legumes which [they] then grind and brew in a gorgeous fermentation batch with caffeine. We can match traditional cold brew because we understand the science and obsession of coffee”.
Human Breast milk
This company is based in Durham, North Carolina. They claim that they have been able to produce the “world’s first cell-cultured human milk outside of the breast”. It will be interesting to see what combination of proteins, fats and sugars make something a real “human breast milk”. This is a Bill Gates backed venture. According to the company's website, since “Biomilq’s product is produced outside the body in a sterile controlled environment, [their] milk will be free from the environmental toxins, food allergens, and prescription medications that are often detected in breast milk”. A mother’s milk is an incredibly dynamic and intimate creation, responding to the needs of the baby, and it is full of beneficial bacteria that strengthen the child. It will be interesting to see how these evolve in their composition, marketing, and legalization.
Apart from their yogurt product, the Israeli company Wilk “has successfully produced human lactoferrin protein in the lab, potentially providing a solution to the baby formula shortage.”. They recently received a patent in the United States for their process, and are working with regulators to enter the market.
This is a Singaporean company that uses precision fermentation to create lactoferrin, which is the protein found in human breast milk. Their signature product is called LF+, and in their roadmap for 2023, they describe the potential for “the application of lactoferrin in adult functional nutrition”. They were featured at the UN's COP27 event, and they have an R&D facility in Sacramento.
(Chinese shoppers in a country 55 times smaller than them to buy milk)
Industrial farmers can sound a bit soulless to the average person when they describe their work to a chemical reaction of “inputs and outputs”. The same reductionist attitude can be seen in the entrepreneurs and food scientists who develop these products. Eat Just created their signature “mayonnaise” by looking at the components of the egg and replacing the components with something plant-based: proteins (pea protein3 and mung bean protein4), binding (modified food starch), and the yellow (beta carotene).
In this article, Professor Michael Hoffmann of Cornell says, “Coffee is just a bunch of chemicals, so to speak ... There are compounds that give us that amazing flavor and aroma, and in part it’s fermented, so it’s logical if you wanted to turn to lentils and dates and ferment them in just the right way to get similar flavors and aroma”.
Components
Processed foods make up a huge proportion of most diets, and the industry is working with processors to create synthetic versions of the different components. I will dedicate future posts to describing the companies and their approaches to creating and legalizing these. Since these components are less regulated than meat or dairy, they are already finding their way into the market.
Here are a few of the companies working on creating fats.
This is a Bay Area company that recently became known among seed-oil averse Twitter. Their product is a cooking oil that is made from “microbes grown in fermentation tanks”. Something interesting is that they are not trying to copy and existing oil, but rather have created something new altogether. Investors include the Bransons and the actor Robert Downey Jr.
This is an Israeli company that now has a production site near Antwerp, Belgium. They refer their synthetic schmaltz as “cultured chicken fat biomass”, and they are working to bring their product to Europe and the US.
This is a Singapore-based company that is working on cell-based fish fat. Their goal is to make it possible to create products like cellular fatty tuna and salmon.
They want to do for fats what heme did for Impossible and their burgers. This Berlin-based company is looking to make their cultivated fat for “hybrid plant-based meat products”5.
They are a London-based company that is looking to replicate animal fats. “We make real animal fat – without the animals”. They are currently hiring for a number of interesting roles.
This is an Estonian company that just received funding “to replace palm oil, coconut oil and animal fats with sustainable and healthier alternatives”.
This company is based in Gothenberg, Sweden. Their goal is to use “precision fermentation to recreate the best characteristics of animal fats. Our idea is to engineer microbial metabolism and dictate the structure and properties of the fats produced by our microbes. The result? We can mimic any fat structure and create new and better fats”. According to their site, they are looking to take these fats and add them to plant-based foods.
This is an Australian company, that is working to supply fats and oils. They make bold claims on their website, such as “foods made with our fats are more than an alternative, they’re a straight-up improvement” or “no farm no harm”6.
The “Protein Transition”
Americans and Europeans might not think about it in their day-to-day, but there are groups of people around the world that are aiming to radically reshape the components of your diet. Some are vegan idealogues, some are scientists who are eager to pioneer a new field, and others are investors who look forward to making untold amounts of money.
If you look in the world of policymakers/UN, you will see a recent boom in references to a “protein transition”. In some of their publications, they take it as given that this will happen by the mid 2030s.
Did you have any idea that your children might not be eating meat from actual animals? Did you know that there are people whose careers and grant money depend on that?
The clothing parallel
Many of these companies plan to operate initially as b2b (business to business) players, supplying their product as an ingredient in processed foods. It is easier to blend some chicken cells into a nugget than to try to replicate a chicken breast. Synthetic milk producers are looking to do the same with their product.
Shiok Meats of Singapore have released synthetic shrimp dumplings and plans to produce a “shrimp paste” that is popular in Asia for hotpot. Perfect Day is already selling their “molecularly identical” biosynthetic dairy proteins in ice creams and protein powders in the United States.
Synthetic fabric blends at first were celebrated for producing shirts that needed less ironing. However, consumers became less thrilled when manufacturers started to incorporate ever higher proportions of synthetic fibers into clothing. As clothing manufacturers consolidated, consumers were often left with no other choices. For a shopper at a mall in the United States, it can be a challenge to find a scarf that is 100% wool. I was recently at Nordstrom (a higher end clothing store) and it was nearly impossible to find an evening dress that wasn’t 100% polyester.
It looks like we may see this with the rollout of these meat cell products. We will start with blends of 5-15% “cultured meat cells” in processed foods and eventually it will be hard to find things that are not 100% cultured “meat” cells. Some of these firms refer to these as “hybrid products”. Just like soy has become a ubiquitous component of processed foods (soy lecithin, soy protein, soy oil, etc), these hybrid products will help consumers accept cultured cells in processed foods.
From there, it is only a matter of time until California or some jurisdiction mandates only using lab-grown meat products. Whether it is in the name of safety, climate, water, or any number of causes, it is undeniable that some are seeking to have the same kind of legislation imposed on animal agriculture that the EU and California have passed with regards to internal combustion engine cars.
The diamond parallel
There is no need to mine diamonds anywhere anymore.
For every desirable aspect of a diamond, we can control and enhance it in a lab. We can do this without environmental pollution nor subjecting workers to terrible conditions. Diamond mines around the world are closing down, and there is a bit of panic in the industry as people who hold the traditionally mined diamonds are worrying about becoming bagholders7.
However, a diamond is a regular lattice of just carbon.
Organic structures are far more complicated. They are living.
Will we someday be able to control the growth of organic cells in a way that rivals what we can do for diamonds? Perhaps, but for now, this burgeoning industry is already rushing to make this a talking point.
The End of Growing your own Food?
Growing food locally is something that is more possible than many imagine.
Switzerland is a wonderful example of a place where local food systems supply a healthy and varied diet. My garden in Seattle produces hundreds of pounds of fruit and potatoes with minimal effort. Long-distance shipping of fresh foods is a relatively recent phenomenon.
For much of human history, we lived as homesteaders, and people were able to grow and store much of what they needed.
But what if this is no longer a viable option? What if that is made illegal for “our safety”?
The effects of the industrial age are almost everywhere in the world, including the most sparsely populated areas.
Even in the most remote national parks of North America, contaminants at alarming levels have been detected in rain for over 20 years.
Just like we were forced into previously unimaginable situations due to covid, it is inevitable that our leaders will have to soon make some tough and dramatic decisions in the name of the environment/climate.
“Cows are the new coal”
Just look up this term for yourself. This has become a talking point from the everyone from the UN to climate pundits to politicians.
I love grass-fed beef, and follow many producers who are doing wonderful regenerative work. But if you think they will let you grow your own cows in peace in some rural area once they figure out how to deliver a similar enough product at scale, then I have some mined diamonds to sell you.
What is going to happen to farmland?
Billionaires like Bill Gates have long coveted the lands of farmers. I have spent a lot of my own money getting into food events over the last few years and I have to say, the policy people there really don't care about farmers. Especially the UN ones. On the contrary, much of the urban policy makers are desperate to decouple from farmers.
Looking at the recent train derailments in the US and subsequent release of toxic chemicals over millions of acres American farmland, we have a justified worry about food safety there. Africans who depend on Ukrainian wheat should be very worried now that millions of tons of heavy metals have been dumped in the soils and waterways in Ukraine. Much of the north Canadian pea protein is being irrigated with groundwater that was used for fracking.
As PFAS and other environmental testing becomes more widespread, I wonder what companies and their investors will be ready with their “solutions”.
This could actually be one of the biggest transfers of power in the last 100 years.
In future posts, I will go over which VC firms and Sovereign Wealth Funds have been active in this space, and describe how this quiet coup has been building up over the last few years.
How did I get into researching this?
For years I have wanted to transition from writing code to growing food and enjoying a quiet life outside of the cities. Having worked on IoT projects, I wanted to see what technology I had to look forward to once I could escape suburban life to grow animals in peace with my brother. Recently, I was working at On Deck as a data engineer, where I was built tools to track investments and graph the networks of VC firms. I started applying this methodology to food production, and unraveling the interesting social graphs of the people involved8.
As far as trends went, I saw a big hole in investment where I would have expected to see money for smart livestock technologies.
After a bit of research, it became clear that a number of investors are seeking to completely dismantle the beef and dairy industries, and they put in nearly a billion dollars of investments to do that in just the first quarter of 2022. Tony Seba's think tank RethinkX predicts that the cattle industry will be mostly gone by 2030.
I reached out to beef producers to share my concerns. A common response I got was the farmer looking at me, hands buried in their pockets, uncomfortably exhaling as they look at this Seattle-raised computer programmer warning about yet another threat to their way of life. “But Andy, you see people are always gonna want to eat the real thing”.
How can we learn more about this?
If you have made it this far into my post, you know that this new thing is different. A huge amount of money and power is at stake. I spent 6 months wanting others to publish this kind of article and start the conversation.
If you are feeling caught off guard from this massive change that others have planned for you, subscribe to my Substack to keep up.
Food industry conferences are expensive. For example, Future Food Tech is $2,500. Subscriptions to my Substack help me attend these events and provide the clear coverage that the current food journalists are not providing.
I would like to help ask your questions and make the conversation about this disruptive food future more public.
How do food safety bodies around the world define “meat”, “milk”, and “fat”? Something that seems so simple and intuitive will likely see much litigation over the next decade. These new companies seem to have rushed headlong into this, and may be waiting out the inevitable court challenges to make the case that they are, in fact, what they claim to be.
I will review the components of this new industry. Like any gold rush, people are preparing to furnish and sell the needed shovels.
A future post will describe how this industry came to be, and what has happened to Northern Canada as a result.
The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) only recently gave their positive ruling for its use as a “novel food” for mung bean protein, which give Eat Just the exclusive right to use it for 5 years (unless others apply through the same process). In the US, the USDA allows for a “self-affirmed GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe)”, so a private company can convene their own panel of experts and claim something is safe 🤔)
In a future blog post, I plan to untangle the different terminology of the field, so sign up to keep updated.
These sound like fighting words to the regenerative farmers I know that deeply care about the environment and are working to improve it.
I have a draft of a blog post written about who will be the “bagholders” of the next few years. Subscribe to be notified when it comes out.
This will be a juicy blog post you won't want to miss. The industry has many convoluted and incestuous corporate relationships than can be messy to untangle non-programmatically.