Labiotech.eu

An unsustainable demand for meat has led to companies looking for alternative solutions to conventional farming methods in order to change the way we eat and think about meat. For biotech companies in particular, given recent advancements in technology, it has presented an opportunity to further explore lab-grown meat. Cultured meat is grown using cells acquired from animals by biopsy without the animal being harmed. These harvested cells are then placed in test tubes or bioreactors with a growth medium, which contains nutrients for the cells to grow and multiply. Eventually, the cells form muscle fibers, resulting in ‘lab-grown meat’. In this article, we take a look at 10 cultured meat companies driving the shift towards sustainable food systems. Aleph Farms Headquarters: Israel Founded: 2017 Recent news: Raised $29 million in funding Being one of the better-funded players in the cultivated meat industry, with backers including private equity firm L Catterton, food giant Cargill, and UAE sovereign wealth fund DisruptAD, Aleph Farms aims to differentiate itself from other companies with a focus on premium beef steaks. In fact, the company received approval for its cultured meat in Israel last year. Aleph Farms also recently unveiled modifications to its core technology that will allow it to make whole cuts of beef with fewer steps and at a lower cost. To date, Aleph has been proliferating its cells in one bioreactor and then transferring them to a second bioreactor where they are seeded onto plant-based scaffolds and mature into fat and muscle cells to form its signature thin steaks. But its new approach will see it get rid of the second step, triggering its cells to partially differentiate into fat and muscle in the first bioreactor by altering the media composition. It then harvests the cells and adds them to a plant protein matrix. Furthermore, the company announced earlier this year that it had raised $29 million in funding and said it expects to raise a further $10 to $15 million in the coming months. Believer Meats Headquarters: Israel Founded: 2018 Recent news: Signed a strategic partnership agreement last year with GEA Believer Meats – previously named Future Meat – is on a mission to make it possible for all future generations to eat meat without harming animals or the environment by using non-GMO technology, which it claims enables it to achieve higher-density cell cultures and more efficient media use than other cultured meat startups. The company is developing a range of cell-based products, including hamburgers, chicken breast, and kebab meat. Making cultured meat products accessible and affordable is one of Believer Meat’s main aims, and its efficient growth process allows it to produce cultivated meat at a similar cost to conventionally farmed meat. In fact, in 2021, the company announced it could make almost a pound of cultivated chicken for $7.70, with a 110-gram chicken breast costing $1.70 to make. Also in 2021, Believer Meats raised €308 million ($347 million) in a series B financing round, which at the time marked the largest ever investment in cultured meat, just three years after the company’s launch. The cultured meat company is currently in the process of constructing its first U.S. commercial facility in Wilson, North Carolina, which, at 200,000 square feet, will be the biggest cultured meat production center in the world. It also signed a strategic partnership agreement last year with GEA, one of the world’s largest suppliers of production-scale equipment and systems to the food, beverage, and pharmaceutical industries. The partnership is focused on co-developing technologies and processes to improve the unit economics and sustainability of cultivated meat production. BioBetter Headquarters: Israel Founded: 2015 Recent news: Opened its first food-grade pilot facility to accelerate the production of growth factors for the cultured meat industry Although not a direct developer of lab-grown meat, BioBetter is looking to relieve the high costs in the cultivated meat sector and tackle the limited availability of growth factors, which play a crucial part in enabling cells to multiply. The company’s vision involves using its green technology to supply food, reduce animal cruelty, and make a positive environmental impact. It has a unique method of doing this, harnessing the advantages of tobacco plants by turning them into bioreactors to create sustainable animal-free growth factors. It has also developed a purification method that enables cost-efficiency in the unlimited production scale of proteins. Growth factors are, of course, essential in the cultivated meat process for cells to grow and multiply. The cellular agriculture industry currently depends on a limited supply of costly growth factors for its operations. But BioBetter claims that its tobacco plant discovery could significantly reduce production costs by 300%. In its series A funding round in 2022, BioBetter received $10 million, led by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), with additional investment from Milk and Honey Ventures and the Israeli Innovation Authority (IIA). At the time, the company said that the funding would allow it to move to a larger pilot facility to help increase its tobacco plant processing capacity. Indeed, in 2023, it announced that it had opened its first food-grade pilot facility to accelerate the production of its growth factors for the cultured meat industry. Eat Just (Good Meat) Headquarters: California, U.S. Founded: 2011 Recent news: Received USDA approval for cultivated chicken Eat Just, a company focused on alternative egg products, has a cultured meat division called Good Meat, which mainly focuses on growing chicken. It became the first ever cultured meat company to have its product approved for sale when it received regulatory approval to market its lab-grown chicken in Singapore in 2020. More recently, in 2023, Good Meat also became the joint-first company, alongside Upside Foods, to have its cultivated chicken approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), marking the first time any sort of cultivated meat had received approval in the U.S. Furthermore, in 2022, it was announced that Good Meat signed a seven-year deal with bioprocess equipment specialist ABEC to design, manufacture, install, and commission the industry’s largest known bioreactors for producing avian and mammalian cell-based meat. In January 2023, plans were announced to install a 6,000-liter bioreactor at its new facility in Singapore, due to open this year. Meatable Headquarters: The Netherlands Founded: 2018 Recent news: Collaborated with three global organizations dedicated to advancing sustainable food systems Meatable’s main focus is currently on cultivated pork products, which it produces with its opti-ox technology that can grow real muscle and fat cells from pluripotent stem cells at speed and at 100% efficiency, according to the company. It also said that its technology was adaptable to any cell-based species, including cows, sheep, and fish. Last year, the cultivated meat company hosted Europe’s first pre-approval cultured meat tasting, in which people tried Meatable’s lab-grown sausage. The product contains 28% cultivated pork fat, while the remaining ingredients are plant-based. The company also said that it had reduced the production time of its product by 50%, meaning it now has a four-day production period instead of an eight-day one. Meatable also recently collaborated with three global organizations dedicated to advancing sustainable food systems: Food Tank, The United Nations Global Compact, and The Hunger Project. This collaboration is part of Meatable’s ongoing efforts to address the environmental and societal challenges of global food production. Last year, the company announced that it had raised €7.6 million ($8.7 million) in funding from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency. Since its launch in 2018, Meatable has raised an impressive €97 million ($112 million) in funding. Mosa Meat Headquarters: The Netherlands Founded: 2016 Recent news: Submitted its first EU Market Authorization request for its cultivated beef fat Mosa Meat is a Netherlands-based food technology company aiming to reshape the global food system by pioneering a ‘cleaner, kinder way of making beef’. It produces its cultured meat by collecting myosatellite cells from cows and growing them in a lab, where the cells merge naturally, forming fibers that eventually grow to 800 million strands of tissue from a single sample. Company co-founder Mark Post was behind the world’s first hamburger made from cultured meat, which was unveiled at a news conference in London in 2013. The burger, made from 20,000 muscle fibers grown from cow stem cells, took three months to make and came at a cost of €250,000 ($330,000), financed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. One of Mosa Meat’s main focuses has been bringing down the production costs of cultured meat to make it more affordable and accessible for consumers. In March 2023, the cultured meat company announced that it had signed a Letter of Intent with its investor, Nutreco, a global leader in animal nutrition and aqua feed, to develop a cell feed supply chain. This can help to lower costs through the use of food-grade ingredients – instead of pharma-grade ingredients – in basal media (cell feed). Earlier this year, Mosa Meat submitted its first EU Market Authorization request for its cultivated beef fat, which also signals the first cultivated beef submission in the EU’s history. The company said that its decision to start with cultivated fat is based on the unique regulatory structure in Europe. Unlike, for example, in Singapore, where entire products are assessed, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) reviews each novel ingredient individually. The company has now also filed for regulatory approval in the U.K. Multus Biotechnology Headquarters: U.K. Founded: 2019 Recent news: Launched new food-grade basal media called DMEM/F12-FG Founded in 2019 by four students in the Life Sciences and Bioengineering departments of Imperial College London, Multus Biotechnology is a cultured meat company looking to develop high-performance growth media formulations at an affordable price to cultivate cells. It utilizes a combination of data science and automation to screen its library of growth media ingredients. The company seeks to overcome the technical challenge within the cultured meat industry of reaching scale and price parity with farmed products. By focusing on the discovery of novel ingredients, the company can build a sustainable supply chain of scalable and affordable ingredients, using production processes that have already been widely adopted. Multus Biotechnology’s next-generation growth media ingredients and formulations form the building blocks of cellular agriculture, enabling the production of animal products using cells instead of the animal itself. In May 2025, the company announced the launch of its new food-grade basal media, called DMEM/F12-FG. The formulation is designed to deliver essential nutrients, including sugars, salts, minerals, and vitamins, that are critical for optimal cell growth in cultivated meat production. Meanwhile, in January 2023, the company closed a £7.9 million ($9.5 million) series A funding round, led by Mandi Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund. The funding will allow Multus Biotechnology to build a world-first production growth media facility in the UK. SuperMeat Headquarters: Israel Founded: 2015 Recent news: Collaborated with Stämm to enhance its cultivated chicken meat process with Stämm's novel bioreactor SuperMeat’s mission is to bring the world the highest quality chicken meat, grown directly from cells, in a sustainable and animal-friendly process. It says that it believes cultivated meat will enhance the food system, providing nutritional security, drastically reducing carbon emissions, and increasing food safety worldwide. The company’s chicken is produced from healthy chicken cells, with no genetic engineering involved, and is grown in a nutritious feed, with no antibiotics and in a contaminant-free environment. The cultured meat company recently announced that it had managed to achieve cost parity for its lab-grown chicken with premium pasture-raised chicken in the U.S., meaning that it can now produce 100% cultivated chicken at $11.79 per pound on a large scale. This is a significant step towards commercialisation and signals progress for the industry in its efforts to offer an affordable, sustainable alternative to conventional meat. Meanwhile, in February 2025, SuperMeat announced a collaboration with biopharma manufacturing company Stämm to further enhance SuperMeat's cultivated chicken meat process with Stämm's novel bioreactor. The collaboration aims to enhance muscle fiber growth, elongation, and fusion into mature muscle tissue, while also enhancing adipocyte formation, to produce organic whole-cut pieces. These developments are expected to result in a significant increase in product mass, enabling the production of cost-effective cultivated meat that closely mimics conventional meat structure and flavor. Upside Foods Headquarters: California, U.S. Founded: 2015 Recent news: Received USDA approval for cultivated chicken Formerly known as Memphis Meats, Upside Foods was the first company to be granted a ‘no questions’ letter from the FDA, indicating that the regulator had accepted UPSIDE Foods’ conclusion that its chicken is safe to eat. The company then went on to become the join-first, alongside Good Meat, to have its cultured chicken approved by the USDA in 2023. The company is now also eyeing a second approval later this year for its shredded chicken. The company also cultivated the world’s first lab-grown beef meatball, and in 2017, produced the world’s first cultivated chicken and duck meat. In 2021, it unveiled its new cultivated meat production facility in the U.S., EPIC, containing custom-made, patented cultivators that can produce over 50,000 pounds of cultured meat. In 2017, the company closed its $17 million series A funding round with support from Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Meanwhile, it received $161 million in its series B funding round in 2020 and $400 million in its latest series C round, which is the largest funding round in the cultivated meat industry to date. This brought Upside Foods’ valuation at the time to over $1 billion, which helped to accelerate its path to commercialization. Vow Headquarters: Australia Founded: 2019 Recent news: Gained approval for cultivated meat products in Australia Just today, it was announced that Vow’s cultivated whipped pate, foie gras, and an edible tallow candle will soon be available on the menu at some high-end Australian restaurants, including Bottarga in Melbourne and Nel in Sydney. The products have already been available in Singapore for more than a year, as Vow said its demand had grown by 200% a month, but this marked the first ever approved sale of cultured meat in Australia. Vow, which is based in Sydney, produces its products from cultured Japanese quail cells, selling them under the Forged brand, which launched last year in select Singapore restaurants. The reason for cultivating quail cells is that they were one of the first cells that were found to grow really well. This was realized after Vow had cultivated cells from about 50 species, including a giant meatball made of woolly mammoth. In the end, the company found that “smaller is easier.” In 2022, Vow secured AUD $73 million ($47.4 million) in a Series A funding round, which came after it had raised AUD $7.7 million ($5 million) in seed funding in 2021 and opened its first factory in Sydney in October 2022. Cultured meat: Progress made, but challenges remain Since the world was introduced to the first lab-grown burger in 2013, developed by Mark Post, co-founder and chief scientific officer (CSO) of Mosa Meat, the cultured meat sector has grown enormously, with investors increasingly more likely to fund cultured meat startups. A recent report predicted that the global cultured meat market will be worth $2.1 billion by 2033, with that figure increasing to $13.7 billion by 2043. In 2020, Singapore became the first country where lab-grown meats could be legally sold. This was followed by the U.S. three years later, Israel last year, and Australia earlier today, suggesting that countries are beginning to embrace the idea of cultured meat. Additionally, the European Union (EU) launched a research project in January 2024 called Feasts. Funded by the Horizon program, the aim here is to deliver a “comprehensive, unbiased knowledge base about cultured meat and seafood and their place in the food system.” However, challenges still lie ahead. In 2023, Italy became the first country to officially ban the production, sale, and importation of cultivated meat, with the vote being seen as a victory for the country’s agricultural sector and Italian cultural traditions. Even in the U.S., there have been pushbacks; last year, Florida and Alabama became the first two states to ban the sale of cultivated meat and seafood. Nevertheless, the predicted growth of the lab-grown meat market, as well as the growing desire from consumers to find meat alternatives for the sake of the planet and, in some cases, their own health, suggests that this technology could be set to really break through in more countries in the coming years.