The cultured meat told by those who grow it
From Upside Foods to Eat Just: The pros, cons, breakthroughs, failures, and hurdles of lab-grown meat. The Wall Street Journal article
The possibility of lab-grown meat making its way onto American plates received a boost last fall when the Food and Drug Administration declared Upside Foods-grown chicken safe for the first time.
“It's almost time to eat lab meat,” Eric Schulze, Upside's vice president of global science and regulatory affairs, said on Twitter as the company toasted the milestone with champagne emojis. “Our Upside Chicken is coming to consumers very soon.”
Since its founding in 2015, Berkeley, California-based Upside has grown from a little-known startup to a darling of the cultured meat industry, valued at $1 billion and backed by investors like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Kimbal Musk, and others. meat giants Tyson Foods Inc. and Cargill Inc. Globally, more than 150 meat companies have raised $2.8 billion to date.
While Upside and others have long been able to grow small quantities of meat from cells, producing larger volumes at low cost is proving much more difficult, according to interviews with current and former Upside employees, industry officials , investors and external scientists.
Many are skeptical that laboratory meat companies – which rely on expensive technology to produce a low-priced product – will be able to produce meat at prices affordable enough to make a significant impact on the global meat market. which amounts to more than 1,000 billion dollars.
Hybrid products, often made with animal cells and other ingredients such as plant proteins, are expected to have a faster and less expensive path to market.
“We are able to successfully produce them on a small scale,” said Josh Tetrick, chief executive officer of a competing food technology company, Eat Just of Alameda, Calif., which in March received the second green light from the FDA to the food safety of its farmed chicken. "What is uncertain is whether we and other companies will be able to produce this product on a large scale and at minimal cost within the next decade."
Tetrick said Eat Just's Good Meat unit sells less than 2.2 tons a year of its hybrid chicken grown in Singapore, the only country that now allows the sale of lab-grown meat to consumers. By comparison, global meat production is projected to exceed 350 million tonnes this year.
Upside argues that lab-grown meat has the potential to feed an expanding global population while saving animals from slaughter and imposing a smaller environmental impact on the planet than traditional meat.
Uma Valeti, the company's chief executive, said Upside has proven that it can safely produce a delicious product. The company said it helped pioneer an industry and is making progress in growing larger quantities of meat while reducing its costs.
“What we are trying to do is not easy. It's like putting a man on the moon,” Valeti said. "There is no roadmap or project."
Upside works to develop new products and processes at its Emeryville, Calif., pilot plant opening in 2021. The company said it plans to serve its first commercial product, a chicken tenderloin, at a three-Michelin-star restaurant in San Francisco once approved by the Department of Agriculture. The company calls the product fillets, rather than chicken breasts, because it doesn't come from a living animal.
Cultured meat is typically made by placing a few cells of poultry and livestock into stainless steel tanks known as bioreactors, where they are fed nutrients and oxygen before being harvested and made into meat products.
According to former employees, Upside has struggled to produce large quantities of meat. They said the company often scrambled to produce enough for lab analysis and tastings. For years Upside has worked to grow whole cuts of meat, which has proven difficult in its bioreactors. He has struggled with contamination in his laboratories. Traces of rodent DNA contaminated a chicken cell line, former employees reported and company executives confirmed.
Today, the company grows its main tenderloin not in large bioreactors in the pilot plant, but in two-liter plastic bottles, similar to those used by pharmaceutical companies for decades to grow cells.
To produce a few fillets, hundreds of disposable bottles are needed.
“These bottles are not scalable. They're too small and too labor intensive,” said David Humbird, an independent chemical engineer who wrote a skeptical report on the industry.
Upside said the process works well for small-scale production of chicken fillets.
“It's a ' fake it till you make it' principle,” said Samir Qurashi, a former Upside employee, referring to the company's public announcements of its progress. Qurashi left Upside after three months when her manager, a co-founder of the company, was fired in 2021.
The company said it was transparent with the public. Upside said it has disclosed the use of plastic bottles in filings with the FDA and uses containers of various sizes to produce the meat.
In 2021 Upside said it had found a way to produce some of the meat without using animal components. But the first chicken fillets won't be made using this process, the company said, adding it plans to phase out the use of animal components.
According to company executives, the Upside pilot plant is not yet operating at the 23-ton annual capacity announced when it opened in 2021, much less its future goal of 182 tons. Production will be able to accelerate when Upside receives USDA clearance, company executives said.
Many of Upside's investors said they were confident that they had long-term bets on the company and its progress so far.
“There's never a precise timeline or crystal ball on how something new in the world progresses,” said Priti Youssef Choksi, partner at Norwest Venture Partners.
Industry champions said they are confident that continued scientific progress will help reduce the cost of producing cultured meat, while climate change and global population growth will intensify the need for it.
"If alternative proteins are not successful, the goals of the Paris climate agreement will probably be impossible to achieve," said Bruce Friedrich, president of the Good Food Institute, a non-profit organization that supports alternative proteins. Beef and dairy cattle, along with other farm animals, are a major source of methane, a greenhouse gas.
Upside's progress has been hampered by an initial quest to grow large pieces of tissue in its bioreactors with the goal of producing whole cuts of meat, current and former employees said. The company ran into problems with this costly and time-consuming process as other companies proliferated using simpler techniques.
More recently, Upside has focused on these techniques to make a slurry of cells and ground meat that is cheaper and easier to make. The company said last week it plans to offer — pending a regulatory review — new products, including chicken sausages, sandwiches and dumplings, which will be a blend of animal cells and other ingredients such as vegetables and plant-based proteins.
“It turned out that the fabric, or creating this whole texture, was really challenging,” said Amy Chen, chief operating officer of Upside, who added that the company has long sought to create a variety of products.
Upside has also faced problems common to other cultured meat producers, including fighting bacteria, former employees said.
Meat farming requires meticulous sterilization because small amounts of bacteria can quickly invade a bioreactor, ruining a batch.
For years Upside operated out of a building with an air filtration system that contributed to contamination and an unreliable autoclave, a machine that sterilizes equipment, the former employees said. Contamination was also an issue as Upside opened its new pilot plant.
Upside said it has gone through the usual setbacks of starting production at its new facility and is very confident in the safety of its products.
The company said the contamination can slow production, but it doesn't affect the final cultured products, unlike conventional meat. The company said the autoclaves sometimes require maintenance and that meat grown for consumers will not be produced in the older building. Upside said it has put in place additional measures to prevent the risk of contamination.
In a 2019 incident, an analysis of a line of farmed chicken revealed that it had been contaminated with a small amount of rodent DNA, former employees said and Upside executives confirmed for this article.
Chen said the DNA came from a common medical research technique that used treated rodent cells to support the growth of meat cells early in the cultivation process. The company immediately stopped using this technique.
Upside says it believes a small number of people consumed meat samples grown from that line before the contamination was discovered thanks to a highly sensitive test. The company said it has not conducted tastings with the general public, but declined to specify who might have eaten it. Valeti said the cell line was only used for research and development and that it poses no safety concerns.
Some industry officials believe companies can overcome the contamination issues, but that there will be other hurdles, including those related to difficult cell cultivation and the high cost of supplies.
Recently, investment in the alternative protein sector has declined amid a slowdown in venture financing. Cargill, an early investor in Upside, remains hopeful that cultured meat will one day be available to many consumers, even as it sees it as a minor part of the protein offering for some time, said Florian Schattenmann, Cargill's chief technology officer. .
In 2016, Valeti said Upside aimed to launch its products at high-end restaurants and grocery stores by 2019 and at Costco by 2021. At the time, Valeti said that within two decades, most of the meat sold in shops would have been produced by cultivation.
Upside said the pandemic has delayed the time-to-market for products, closing the company's laboratories and making it more difficult to procure some supplies.
“It wasn't a walk in the park,” Valeti said. “But we went into this situation knowing it was going to be really challenging.”
(Excerpt from the foreign press review by eprcomunicazione )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/la-carne-coltivata-raccontata-da-chi-la-coltiva/ on Sun, 30 Apr 2023 05:13:57 +0000.