NZ cultivated meat start-up breaks out of stealth mode

A chicken dish featuring lab-grown meat from Upside Foods. On November 17, the US Food and Drug Administration cleared the “slaughter-free” chicken, putting lab-grown meat one step closer to restaurant menus and grocery store shelves in the US. The clearance made the US the second country to greenlight "cultivated" meat, after Singapore. Photo / The New York Times

A Kiwi start-up in the “cultivated meat” sector - or what many traditional farmers call “vat-grown meat” - has broken cover.

Opo Bio is officially out of stealth mode this week - and Beef + Lamb New Zealand has shared its reaction with the Herald (keep reading).

Co-founder Olivia Ogilvie explains that, simply because the field is so new, cultivated meat has mostly involved vertically integrated companies - or outfits that cover all of the necessary steps themselves.

These steps go from sourcing cell lines to the “media” that nourishes them (what Ogilvie calls “Powerade for cells”) to the “growth factors” (signals that tell the cells to divide) and the edible “scaffolding” that the meat grows on, in lieu of pre-existing muscle.

The scaffolding, which can be made from seaweed or gelatin, is edible.

But now that the sector is getting closer to commercialisation, companies dedicated to various parts of the process are starting to emerge.

In Opo Bio’s case, it’s focusing primarily on cell lines from livestock, with a sideline in media.

At the moment, the start-up is mostly working with cow and pig cells, but also doing some work with sheep.

The process starts with tissue samples taken from livestock. “We take a sample of cells from muscle, fat and connective tissue,” Ogilvie explains.

“That’s what meat is made up of; those three components.

“We isolate those cells and we do some science on them to isolate our cells that grow faster and need less food - just like some animals grow faster and need less food.”

How quickly animal meat grows, and its flavour, depends on the distribution of fat, muscle and connective tissue cells. The same holds true for cultivated meat - only with scope for tweaking the mix.

“Basically what we do is we design the best ‘seeds’ to grow meat and those seeds are cells,” Ogilvie says.

“Once you develop the best cell line, you’d sell it to the producer.”

“We hope that, in the same way companies breed bull semen, each year we’ll have another version that’s more competitive; that gives higher yields and different genetic characteristics to the year before.”

Ogilvie’s pitch is that the cell her firm draws from cows, sheep and chicken will be processed to be faster growing and more efficiently. Currently, her outfit has only one direct competitor, Scotland’s Roslin - whom you won’t have heard of, but some of its previous output you will be familiar with: Dolly, the first cloned sheep.

Opo - founded in February - was spun out of research by Ogilvie and co-founders Dr Laura Domigan and Dr Vaughan Feisst at Auckland and Canterbury universities; it’s based around intellectual property developed by Domigan. The former’s commercialisation arm, Uniservices, is one of its backers.

In July, it raised $1.5 million in a seed round supported by venture capital firm Matū, Booster (a KiwiSaver operator with a line in ethical investing), Auckland University’s Inventors’ Fund, and angel investors.

The Opo Bio including founders Dr Olivia Ogilvie (centre), Dr Laura Domigan, second from right) and Dr Vaughan Feisst (right). Photo / Zane Carter

The start-up is releasing its first product his week - cell lines for researchers dubbed “Opo-Moo”. It aims to provide cells for commercially cultivated meat-makers within a year. All going well, a “much larger” Series A capital raise is planned for next year.

On Opo’s radar is everyone from specialised cultivated meat firms like Vow in Australia and Upside Foods in the US to traditional meat giants, like Tyson Foods in the US, that are now weighing their options in the emerging sector.

That doesn’t mean you’ll be tucking into a vat-grown chicken for your Christmas roast next year.

Ogilvie’s ballpark estimate is that it will be around seven years before all the technology, regulatory and manufacturing scale elements fall into place for commercially-viable cultivated meat.

A McKinsey & Co report estimated the cultivated meat market could reach US$30 billion ($48.85b) by 2030 on the back of some US$3b in investments. That would be large, in itself, but would represent 2 per cent of the US$1.4 billion ($2.28b) market for animal-grown meat today.

Today, there’s a small amount of action. Singapore gave the green light to cultivated meat sales in 2020, but so far only one private club sells it (scroll down for taste test results). And Just last week, the began the second country to approve it, albeit so far only from one supplier, Upside Foods, which is expected to to release its first product in a few months.

Beef + Lamb NZ fires back

Beef + Lamb NZ general manager, market development Nick Beeby says his organisation did a lot of research three years ago as plant-based “meat” emerged - and he says a lot of the findings and strategy will hold true with cultivated meat (or “petri-dish” or “vat-grown” as he tends to refer to it. Ogilvie prefers to compare the cultivation process to a brewery).

His organisation identified a segment of what it calls “conscious foodies” around the world, who are wary of meat from grain-fed, feed-lot farming and the chemicals used, in some cases, with plant-based alternatives.

He sees that consumer skepticism carrying over to cultivated meat.

“Our target consumer is rejecting the idea of an over-processed product. So we see a clear line of sight for our natural farming systems,” he says.

Beef + Lamb has a “Taste Pure Nature” campaign running in the US and China. The answer to the cultivated meat threat will be more of the same messaging, and to amplify what his organisation sees as its advantages.

Beef + Lamb NZ's Nick Beeby: "Our target consumer is rejecting the idea of an over-processed product. So we see a clear line of sight for our natural farming systems," he says. Photo / File

“There’s still a remarkable opportunity to supply these consumers with a completely natural, grass-fed free range product,” Beeby says.

“They have a strong belief that a natural and well-farmed product will be better for their own personal health and wellbeing.”

Beeby points out that one of the biggest players in alternative proteins, Beyond Meat, has seen its shares fall more than 80 per cent over the past 12 months. (Earlier this month, Beyond said it would lay off 200 people, or around 19 per cent of its staff, after wider than expected losses on revenue that fell 22 per cent to $82.5m.)

He says after a lot of early hype, plant-based meat alternatives have reached what he sees as a saturation level before many expected. He says cost and “mouth feel” are factors.

“I think they [cultivated meat makers] will face many of the same challenges,” he says.

Opportunities for NZ farmers

Ogilvie is, in fact, broadly on the same page as Beeby. Opo Bio’s target is battery-style farming, and all of the issues around animal welfare, environmental harm, and people developing resistance to the antibiotics used so heavily in the process.

“We hope that cultivated meat will decrease our global reliance on intensive agriculture, such as the beef feedlot systems used throughout much of the world,” she says.

She sees local farmers as partners.

“One of the things that we are doing is that we are giving money back to the farms that supply us with tissue,” she says.

“NZ has a track record in food innovation and creating high-value ingredients, we will continue that trend in this new technology sector.”

“This isn’t like a replacement for animal agriculture,” Ogilvie says.

“We see it as an ‘and’ not an ‘or’. We see this as something that New Zealand can do alongside all the other farming systems that we already have. It’s just a different type of farming.

“In the future you’ll go into a supermarket and cultivated meat will be in the section next to animal-grown meat. And different consumers will have different preferences and they might choose different products on different days as they do with plant-based and animal meat today.”

A bite of chicken breast grown from stem cells at Upside Foods in California. Photo / New York Times

How does it taste?

The jury is still out - in part because so few people have tried cultivated meat. Blind tests are promising, but common themes are that tactics like coating, frying, sauces and mixing with plant proteins have made it tricky to get a definitive take - although the lack of fat, and the flavour that comes with it, has been one criticism.

Only about 700 people in the world have ever purchased cultivated meat, according to a New York Times report in February this year. Most of it has been ground, breaded and fried, and all of it in a private club in Singapore, which became the first nation to grant regulatory approval in 2020.

Last week, the US became the second as the Food and Drug Administration gave the green light to self-styled “slaughter-free chicken” maker Upside Foods to sell its cultivated meat, although it’s expected that it will take another few months to reach shelves.

Michal Ansky, an Israeli food journalist who hosts MasterChef Israel and has opened several farmers’ markets, is a fan. She tried cell-based chicken in January during a blind tasting set up by SuperMeat, one of several cell-based meat companies in Israel.

A breakfast patty made from chicken, laboratory grown from stem-cells, at Upside Foods in California. Photo / The New York Times

She and a panel sampled it alongside traditionally-grown minced chicken. Ansky was convinced that the better-tasting chicken came from an animal. She was wrong, and became a convert. She even thinks the meat could find a place at farmers’ markets, the Times reported.

New York Times reporter Kim Severson tried several takes on cultivated chicken made by Upside.

“I sampled a slightly grainy chicken pâté and a perfectly round breakfast patty blended with plant-based proteins that fried up nicely. Generous seasoning masked the flavor of the meat,” she reported in February.

“The breast I ate came from tissue that had grown short meat fibres and had been pressed into plastic moulds to approximate the size and shape of a small boneless breast. It had less chew but much more flavour than a typical grocery-store breast. The biggest difference was how the meat reacted in a pan. As it browned, the surface looked more like coarsely ground meat than whole muscle.”