Brewing a Better Bite of Meat
Here’s why we led the Series A of The Better Meat Co., announced today.
I am a meat eater, but I know that eventually, we won't slaughter animals for meat. Although we believe this is inevitable, on Earth and Mars, it takes concerted effort to get us there. And as we saw with electric cars, you have to have a better product to catalyze a change. Saving the world is the byproduct.
After investing in some of the pioneers of cellular ag and precision fermentation, we pondered what problem remained unsolved by the mainstream approaches to slaughter-free meat and began a quest for the best cost economics and speed of scaling. For cellular ag and plant-based approaches, cost has been their biggest challenge, and the meat market is highly price elastic.
We did a thought experiment: given all of the approaches to alt-protein out there, which will be the lowest cost 50 years from now? We assumed all R&D efforts reach their ultimate end points by then. I think we found the winner: Better Meat goes from seed to harvest in under 17 hours! No plant or animal can compete with that growth rate. The key: growth from cell expansion instead of cell division, part of the magic of the kingdom of fungi. And they have mastered continuous production off simple sugar feedstocks with no waste stream. The only downstream processing is some dehydration.
At their current research scale facility, they already beat beef on cost, and soon chicken. Some of the key drivers from their patented process: fastest growth cycle of any organism, continuous production, minimal downstream processing (unlike plant protein isolates, for example, where most of the plant biomass is byproduct), and it’s a nutritious whole food. It’s also shelf stable at room temperature for easy shipping. So, it should scale more rapidly and cost-effectively than other approaches can ever achieve.
Oh, and it is delicious and tastes like meat, even better than pure meat in some blended product taste tests (think hamburger or sausage blends).
They are a B2B ingredient supplier, and the first to get FDA and USDA approval for blended meat products. The Series A will allow them to scale to tens of millions of pounds of annual production for a number of large food companies.
Company:
bettermeat.co
Today’s funding news:
•
agfundernews.com/better-meat…
•
greenqueen.com.hk/the-better…