Note: In terms of naming convention, cultivated seems to be the front runner. I’ll be using a bunch of terms interchangeably but they are the same thing.

After visiting 2 countries, touching, feeling, and eating cultured/cell-based/clean/slaughtered free meat, and interviewing privately and publicly experts in the field, I think I can make a firm statement of the state of play in the cell-based meat industry.

As we all know, this industry is extremely black-boxed, with many speculators trying to dig up skeletons in the closet. With a new innovation coming out every week, we can see the technology is starting to spread its wings but it has a long way to go to be sold efficiently at food.

We have to start somewhere, right? 

Potential New Ingredient

(If you have complaints or want me to call it something else, message me)

The rumor is out that most if not all companies can only create essentially a meat slurry or cells with no structure. You need some type of structuring to really solidify meat. I have no clue what the meat slurry looks like but I do know that essentially, we are quite a ways away from bringing even ground meat made with no plant-based support to the equation.

There are already many ideas to structure meat that involve scaffolding or just adding it to a plant-based product.

In most situations, cell-cultured meat companies can pretty much only scale by putting a small amount of their meat into an established system

In a food science/product development perspective, this opens a lot of possible ideas in that we might actually have a functional vegan protein that might be able to clean up a label.

Right now, the only goo that acts like meat is essentially methylcellulose. I can’t tell you how many “smart entrepreneurs” tell me “oh, I want to replace methylcellulose in my plant-based burger with no capital to invest in new tech in my kitchen”. There is a reason Impossible and Beyond and everyone else uses it in their products. Because there’s no replacement. And I swear if I hear one more innovation that involves a 12-step process to functionalize your fiber/protein, I’m going to freak out.

We do not know if meat sludge has the potential to replace methylcellulose and I can only theorize that it’ll coagulate while cooking, which is a good enough situation on replacing methylcellulose (the issue with methylcellulose is that it actually turns to mush when cold because it’s a thermally reversible gel)

It’s going to take a lot of application work from probably Mattson (the closest food consultancy in the Bay Area surrounded by cell-based companies who have a lot of money) to figure out its actual functionality. If meat sludge IS functional in a plant-based system, it will be a much easier sell to get started easing consumers into the tech. Expect this to be a wildcard innovation depending on how companies spin it.

Move Fast, Break Things

Another tech term that doesn’t work in food, but food tech companies will use it anyways.

Whether or not you like this method of commercializing, this is what’s going to happen.

Currently, JUST/GOOD Meat has a first mover advantage in the field and they are aggressively going hard in Singapore. Not only did they actually launch a product, presenting it pretty successfully, but they are also building capacity in Singapore to produce more of it. It is quite impressive to see such a feat for a company that essentially pivoted hard into cell-based meat.

With JUST lighting the fire, this has brought other companies to copy a playbook and will probably follow the same model as JUST.

However, the current playbook will be differentiated. After all, the beauty of startups is that we’ll all be having different products to try.

We have a lot of companies working on chicken, the Asian ones working on seafood, and companies like Vow that want to change our perception of what cultured meat really is (George Peppou and the team have a pretty compelling reason to do this, as you’ll learn in our new episode on Wednesday)

The Home for Innovation

Singapore is so proactive I had a government official come talk to me on my first day here breaking down the government approval process of cultured meat (and other types of food tech). Unfortunately, I couldn’t interview him due to government stuff but it tells you how serious they are. They talked to an average joe like me.

Singapore’s forward stance on cultured meat allowed it to bring it to commercialization for at least companies to bring it to action. Though JUST/GOOD Meat can only produce a limited amount of product a week (I had to beg my connections at JUST for delivery as most of the immersion and hawker tastings are booked weeks out), it’s a start. The meal I got was delivered on whatsapp by a normal guy wearing a One Piece t-shirt.

More and more companies are applying for the 2 year (probably shorter) approval process in Singapore with no sign of stopping.

I’ve visited enough museums in Singapore to see how prideful the city is in sustainability efforts and they are hungry to be the most innovative city in the world.

Most governments are slow or scared of new technology and its bureaucratic system is always a slowdown for anyone involved. Though the Singaporean government isn’t perfect, it’s fast.

Expect to see a lot of cell-based meat tastings in Singapore the next couple of years. Expect more hybrid, or products with a small amount of meat. There is debate if this approach is the right way to go. Whether or not it’s the right way or wrong way, it’s the fastest. And that’s how the world works. Innovation is going faster and faster and I don’t have an answer if that’s a good thing or not.