Lab-grown meat start-ups hope to make strides in 2022

Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of cultivated meat start-up Eat Just, has a vision: He imagines a day when meat grown in a lab is available everywhere from Michelin-star restaurants to street vendors and fast food chains.

But more investment — and regulatory approvals — will be needed to get there. Cultivated or cultured meats are real animal products made in labs and commercial production facilities. Right now, the process is costly, but researchers and entrepreneurs say over time manufacturing will become more efficient and less expensive. If consumers switch to cultivated meat, it could help reduce greenhouse gases from agriculture and ease climate change.

“This isn’t inevitable,” Tetrick said in an interview. “This could take 300 years or it could take 30 years. It’s up to companies like ours to do the real work of building the engineering capabilities … and communicate directly with consumers about what it is and isn’t, and how it can benefit their lives.”

Investors have poured some $2 billion into the space in the last two years, according to Crunchbase data. The year ahead will bring more investment. Eat Just and others are working to win regulatory approval in the United States from the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture.

Nick Cooney, managing partner at LeverVC, which invests in the sector, said he expects approval as early as this year.

“There are several companies in this space that are building out large pilot scale facilities to produce cultivated meat products, but to produce at quite significant volumes, that’s going to involve a lot of capex, a lot of steel, and that’s just going to take time,” he said.

Eat Just has had big breakthroughs over the past two years. In Singapore, it received its first regulatory approval in December 2020 for its Good Meat cultured chicken and it has since been approved to sell new types of cultivated chicken there, including chicken breast, tenders and shredded chicken products.

“It is real meat,” Tetrick said. “And instead of needing billions of animals and all the land and the water, and all the rain forests you typically need to knock down to make that happen, we start with a cell. You can get the cell from a biopsy of an animal, a fresh piece of meat or a cell bank. Now, we don’t need the animal anymore. Then, we identify nutrients needed to feed that cell and … we make it in a stainless steel vessel called a bioreactor.”

Eat Just also sells plant-based egg products made from mung beans in stores including Whole Foods and Publix in the U.S., and it employs more than 200 people.

To date, it says, more than 700 people in Singapore have been served its cultivated meat products — a number Tetrick hopes to rapidly scale up as it receives approvals in other countries.

Once approved, Eat Just said it has already laid the groundwork to hit the ground running. The company’s Good Meat division announced a $267 million capital raise last year to build vessels and systems…