You can grow a pork sausage in 8 days

With the growing demand for “meat without slaughter”, new technological solutions are being created, as described by author Elizabeth Green in her article: “One of the leaders in the field of food technology, Meatable, the Netherlands, claims to have achieved a milestone in the history of cell cultured meat. The company's technology now makes it possible to produce cultured pork products in just eight days at a lower cost. The process is scaling up as the manufacturer aims to bring its cultured meat products to the mass market with a retail launch in 2025.

Speaking to FoodIngredientsFirst, Crane de Nude, CEO and co-founder of Meatable, explains why the company is focusing on pork.

“Pork is the most consumed meat in the world, so we can enter almost any market if we focus on this product. In particular, cultured ground pork can be used to prepare many different foods and dishes. But when we think about the type of food people are most familiar with and would like to try first, the answer is sausages.”

In traditional pig production, it takes about eight months for farmers to get meat. At Meatable, the process of growing caged pork took about three weeks. Over the past year, the company's specialists have been working to increase the efficiency of their process, as well as to increase the quantity and quality of adipose and muscle tissue. As a result, high-quality cultured meat with the desired level of fiber formation, protein, fat accumulation and basic meat flavors can be obtained in just eight days. Cultured pork looks and tastes indistinguishable from traditional pork, de Noud said. 

“To create cultured meat, we isolate a single animal cell and replicate its natural growth process using Opti-ox technology combined with pluripotent stem cells (PSCs). PSCs can replicate indefinitely without change, giving them an advantage over the immortalized cell lines that are more common in the cultured meat industry. With Opti-ox technology, we were able to solve the difficult task of transforming stem cells into more specialized cells such as muscle or fat cells in just a few days, and these cells are real. One of the key points is our specific transcription factors that allow us to speed up the process of differentiation. This is also complemented by the Meatable continuous perfusion process, which allows the company to work in a constant cycle and provides a cell density of about 80 million cells per milliliter, which contributes to superior performance. Therefore, the process is easy to scale up or apply to other types of meat such aschicken or beef . Only with cultured animal cells, which are molecularly indistinguishable from traditional muscle and fat cells, is it possible to achieve a taste, texture and nutritional value identical to conventional meat,” he explained.

Demand for meat without slaughter

The speaker argues that public awareness of the impact of food production on the environment "has never been more pronounced", a trend towards the humanization of the livestock sector is evident. 

“In 2021, a study commissioned by cellular farming company Aleph Foods found that 84% to 85% of Millennials, 76% to 77% of Gen Xers, and 70% to 74% of Boomers are willing and willing to try meat without slaughter. These numbers are growing every day. Therefore, it is important for these people to provide information about cultured meat and its potential to transform the meat industry and the world,” said de Noud. 

Thanks to actively developing technologies in the future, according to the expert, it is possible to achieve price parity with traditional meat: “The element of speed is crucial to achieve cost parity, because it reduces costs. Therefore, we are constantly trying to improve our process: to further increase cell density, to achieve a higher doubling rate and to increase the productivity of differentiation, in order to make the production of high-quality and affordable cultured meat cost-effective. And to realize our vision of "meat without slaughter", we must become competitive on price. Otherwise, only rich people will be able to afford such products.. However, with our recent advances, we have created a manufacturing process that makes cultured meat widely available: a cell density of 80 million per milliliter, a continuous manufacturing process, and a differentiation time of just a few days. This combination allows us to produce affordable cultured meat on a large scale. I am very pleased that our products are being approved by the regulatory authorities and are ready for consumers to try them next year.”