Cultivated fats: “Plant-based meat isn’t good enough yet,” flags Hoxton Farms co-founder

20 Feb 2023 --- Having broken ground on its new pilot facility in central London, Hoxton Farms, a start-up specializing in cultured animal fat, is making strides in changing the way in which animal fat is produced and consumed. Targeting flexitarians, the company is eyeing opportunities within plant-based sectors as it hopes to “move people away from traditional animal farming.”

FoodIngredientsFirst caught up with company co-founder Ed Steele, who tells us how his background of mathematical modeling and love of food ushered him in the direction of processing alternative meat fats. 

“In 2020, myself and co-founder Max Jamilly set up Hoxton Farms with this fundamental philosophy that the traditional meat industry is broken,” he explains. “Of course, the plant-based industry is notable, but we believe that plant-based meat isn’t good enough yet, and still isn’t. That’s because it’s missing one key ingredient: fat.”

Using real animal fat without the animals
Hoxton Farms uses cells from pigs and cows and it grows those cells “in something similar to a fermenter where you brew beer.” This process continues until there are many cells, which are turned into fat cells. 

Max Jamilly (left) and Ed Steele (right), co-founders of Hoxton Farms.“So instead of growing by dividing, as cells do traditionally, they grow by getting bigger and juicier. And these fat droplets grow inside and then that is what harvest at the end of the process.”

Steele says what comes out of the fermenter is the same as traditional animal fat – it’s just purified. “We’re selling that ingredient B2B to plant-based companies so that they can make products that look, cook and taste just as good as the real thing, if not even better,” he asserts.

For Hoxton Farms, the focus is to move people away from traditional animal farming methods. Interestingly, Steele admits there is also an opportunity to evolve away from plant oils, which are “not a very good replacement for traditional animal fat.”

“Ingredients like coconut oil don’t have the same melting temperature of animal fat,” he outlines. “They also don’t taste right in a plant-based meat alternative, and they don’t perform in the way that they should. We want to enable consumers to cook products containing our cultivated fat as if they were cooking real meat.”

Steele believes consumers should be able to move away from traditional meat without changing their behaviors. “And that’s important to us, so to do that, we need to give people products that recreate that sensory experience of cooking meat,” he says. 

Scaling up and gaining regulatory approval 
The company is building a new pilot facility in central London, which is on track to produce “significantly more cultivated fat.” Steele tells us that the facility will be up and running mid-this year, not just for production, but Hoxton’s office and research lab will also be relocated there.  

“Although we work in a lab at the moment, when we are at full-scale manufacturing, for example, it will be more similar to a brewery than a lab or a distillery,” Steele explains. “There are processes in the F&B industry currently that are fairly technical, such as brewing or coffee roasting, and we are positioning ourselves in that technical standpoint rather than growing animal fat in a lab.”

For Hoxton Farms, it’s early days from a scale-up and regulatory sense, adds Steele. 

“We have companies that we’re developing partnerships with but aren’t selling yet because what we make is a novel food. In the UK, it needs to be approved and also approved in every jurisdiction where we’re planning to sell our product.”

Notably, cell-based ingredients are making waves across the F&B landscape with landmark moments such as premarket approvals from Upside Foods and approval in Singapore for cultivated meat products. 

“It’s an exciting time to be in this space,” notes Steele, adding that the regulatory processes in the UK can be “challenging due to Brexit.” 

“I think the UK has this amazing opportunity now to push forward and become a world leader in alternative protein.”

“So far, in terms of novel foods, approval is taking much longer than in the US or Singapore, but there are ministers in this country (UK) who are encouraging the European Food Safety Authority to push forward. This means that companies like us are likely to go to market first in the US or Singapore,” he reveals. 

Crossroads of environment and health
Steele reiterates the common concern that the meat alternatives consumers have access to currently “just aren’t good enough from a taste, health and environmental sustainability aspect.”

One of the key drivers for consumers is climate and health. “And so if we can give people products that are much better for the environment and much healthier, then we can encourage people to cut down significantly on the amount of meat they eat.

Hoxton Farms’ methods of developing animal fats are deemed “healthier” because they are made in an extremely sterile and safe processing environment, which means compared to traditional meat, where abattoirs and meat processing facilities are not the most sanitary places. 

Moreover, Steele believes Hoxton Farm’s ingredients “are made much safer for people to eat.” Hoxton Farms uses cells from pigs and cows and it grows those cells “in something similar to a fermenter where you brew beer.”

“Our ingredients are antibiotic-free and we can change the properties of the fat we make by changing how we grow our cells. That allows us to change things like the saturated fat content and the type of fatty acids inside the fats we make.”

“Ultimately, we can make something healthier than the fats which are around at the moment,” he says.  

Reducing cost by replacing ingredients?
Hoxton Farms is positioned as a “pretty unique company,” as Steele puts it. “There aren’t many companies out there replicating animal fat, but we do. And that’s primarily because, technically, it’s tough.”

“The cells we use are used to growing in an animal’s body, so encouraging them to grow outside of the body at a large scale is a big technical challenge.”

According to Steele, it requires quite a lot of capital expenditures. “Companies are trying to take shortcuts in developing better fats for the plant-based meat industry, but we want to give consumers the real thing,” he outlines.  

“Right at the start of production, while companies are still building manufacturing facilities, costs will be higher. But every company in this space is looking to reduce the costs of growing cell-based products significantly,” he affirms. 

“We want to reach a point where we’re not increasing the cost of plant-based meat products containing our cultivated fat. We want to reduce their costs by replacing the plant oils they currently use and other ingredients, like flavorings and binding agents, for example.”

Steele says that flavorings are “a huge cost, and given the flavor that you get from cultivated fat, you no longer need significant flavorings in plant-based products.”

“So all of that will allow us to reduce the cost of meat alternatives in the long term, especially given the circumstances around inflation and the cost of living crisis,” he comments. “And if we’re going to make the dent that we want to make as a company, we can only do that by enabling people to buy it, and people can only buy it if it’s cheap enough.”

By Elizabeth Green