Alt-meat affordability: SuperMeat lowers cultivated chicken costs with animal-free media

Food tech company SuperMeat claims it has achieved a “breakthrough” in commercializing cultivated chicken, reducing its cost to US$11.79 per pound at scale, on par with pasture-raised premium chicken in the US. It can formulate three pounds of meat in two days, compared to the 42 days it takes to raise and process a traditional chicken for “high yields at unprecedented speed.”

The Israel-based firm leverages embryonic stem cells to produce fat tissues in 24 hours and muscle tissues in four days directly from animal cells.

Food Ingredients First speaks with Shir Friedman, co-founder and head of communications at SuperMeat, to understand how the company lowered the cost of cultured chicken, the techniques involved and where the industry is headed.

What does achieving price parity with conventional chicken mean for the company?
Friedman: Ever since Professor Mark Post famously introduced the world’s first cultivated meat burger back in 2013, there’s always been skepticism around this topic, which has been shifting, from scalability and taste to cost. The cost parity and milestones we’ve showcased are an incredible step in alleviating this skepticism. Slowly and surely, we’re tackling the bits and pieces of the skepticism that is still around this topic and it’s our responsibility to prove itself deserving of consumers.

We spoke with SuperMeat’s co-founder Shir Friedman to discuss the company’s efforts at achieving cultivated chicken price parity.How does SuperMeat achieve high-speed fat and muscle production for cultivated chicken?
Friedman: We take stem cells from a fertilized chicken egg and introduce them into conditions that mimic perfectly the natural conditions within the animal’s body, and through the right diet, we push them in the right directions into muscle fat tissues, which are produced pretty quickly in the chicken’s body as well. The cells grow in a rich cell feed that contains everything cells love and need to grow, including amino acids, sugars, vitamins and everything the cells need to grow. It’s no different than feeding animals in conventional factory farms to produce their muscle and fat tissues.

How does the company reduce the cost of media, a key concern for formulators?
Friedman: The media accounts for about 60%–80% of the final cost of cultivated meat, which is similar to conventional meat production and plays a big role in the cost of production. We tackle it in two aspects. The first is to drop the costs of the cell feed by eliminating expensive components from the media, such as animal-based components. Our cells have been very efficient in naturally producing their own growth factors, so we don’t need to add growth factors to our media, thus reducing its cost.

The second aspect of this is the feeding regime. The more cells you feed, the more you have to pay for the cell feed. We’ve managed to reduce the daily feeding regime to one and a half vessel volumes a day on average, which is considered very low. 

Once scaled, SuperMeat’s process is projected to produce 3 million kg of cultivated chicken per year (Image credit: SuperMeat).How close is SuperMeat’s cultivated chicken to its conventional counterpart in texture, taste and nutrition?
Friedman: It is the fat and muscle tissues that give us the culinary experience and nutritional values associated with chicken. So, if you produce these tissues, you will get the exact nutritional and culinary experience of chicken. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing at SuperMeat. We’ve specifically chosen cells that could become muscle and fat naturally, without any genetic engineering. We conducted a blind taste test a couple of years ago with some culinary experts who were given 100% cultivated chicken, with no seasonings and with 100% traditional chicken. When asked which is which, they couldn’t tell the difference. They perfectly mimic each other. 

What role can governments and companies play in increasing consumer awareness about cultivated meat?
Friedman: I think what the governments can do to help support this industry is to keep doing exactly what they’ve been doing — funding different cultivated meat projects. For example, the USDA, the European Union, smaller governments like Israel and Singapore and others have been granting funds for cultivated meat research or projects. When the time comes, when this product is ready for market, I think they will do a good job at introducing it to the mass market. Also, we are working with conventional meat players in developing this product to eventually introduce the meat players to an additional set of tools to produce the same meat that the consumers love to eat, since they know the final consumer the best. Once we reach that stage, we can trust them to do the best job with it.

Do you think cultivated meat will be the norm or co-exist with traditional meat in the future?
Friedman: Cultivated meat is an additional set of tools for the conventional meat industry to harness for meat production, to reduce the ecological footprint and to increase the control over the final product and quality. What part or portion of the market will cultivate meat be, is hard to tell. What I can tell you is that it’s very important to have this option because we can’t keep producing meat the same way that we do right now because we don’t have enough of the planet for it. However, I think conventional meat production will always be around in terms of its proportionality, since it is a big part of our culture.