Chemical Engineering April 2022 - 18

Meanwhile, Upside Foods (Berkeley,
Calif.; www.upsidefoods.com)
completed construction of its Engineering,
Production and Innovation
Center (EPIC) in Emeryville, Calif. last
November. The 53,000-ft2 campus
is designed to produce any species
of meat, poultry and seafood directly
from animal cells. Patented, custommade
cultivators (Figures 1 and 4)
can produce over 50,000 lb/yr of finished
product, with a future capacity
to over 400,000 lb/yr. Initially, the
company started producing meat
for its group of restaurant partners.
The company - formerly known as
Memphis Meats - introduced the
world's first cultivated meatball in
February 2016 and the world's first
cultivated poultry in March 2017.
Also in November, Shiok Meats
(Singapore; www.shiokmeats.com)
officially opened its first-of-a-kind
R&D facility for cultivated seafood.
B&V collaborated with Shiok Meats
for the conceptual design and layout
of this facility, which will help Shiok
Meats, the world's first
cultivated
crustacean company, scale-up production
of cell-based crustacean
meat products, targeting commercialization
by 2023.
" Building the Mini Plant is a big
milestone for us, " said Sandhya Sriram,
group CEO & co-founder, Shiok
Meats at the opening of the plant.
" Our production facility, which is due
in the next 18 months, will be an extension
of this Mini Plant in terms of
engineering design and foundation.
This new facility allows us to scale the
cultivated seafood production gradually
and strategically to ensure a comprehensive
manufacturing model and
top-notch products, " she said.
Meanwhile BlueNalu, Inc. (San
Diego, Calif; www.bluenalu.com) is
scaling up to pilot scale. " The completion
of our pilot production facility
and the preparation to achieve
regulatory requirements needed by
the U.S. FDA for our cell-cultured
seafood products are both currently
in process, " says Lou Cooperhouse,
the company's co-founder, president
and CEO. " Our new BlueNalu Innovation
Center will be 40,000 ft2 and
will incorporate a processing environment
that enables production of
limited volumes under Good Manu18
facturing
Practices (GMP) conditions
and global best practices in food
safety. This will enable us to continually
ideate, innovate and introduce
new species, and new forms and
packaging options for our customers
and consumers, " he says.
" We have developed a multi-species
platform technology in which we
are initially developing finfish products
that include pacific bluefin tuna, " explains
Cooperhouse. " We are specifically
targeting species that are
overfished, primarily imported and
difficult to farm-raise. It is our goal,
as a result of this strategy, to reduce
fishery pressure, complement the existing
seafood supply chain, displace
the need for imports, create jobs,
enhance food security, and offer the
ultimate seafood experience in each
region we go to market, " he says.
Meanwhile, The Cultured Food Innovation
Hub will start up in Kemptthal
near Zurich this year. This new
facility for developing cellular agricultural
products was established by
Swiss companies Givaudan (Vernier;
www.givaudan.com), Bühler
and
Migros (Migros-Industrie MigrosGenossenschafts-Bund;
Zurich;
www.mgb.ch). The Cultured Food Innovation
Hub aims to accelerate the
development and market penetration
of cellular agriculture products.
The new entity provides facilities
and knowledge to accelerate other
companies on their cultured meat,
cultured fish and seafood, and precision-fermentation
developments.
The Hub will be equipped with a
product-development laboratory, as
well as cell culture and bio-fermentation
capabilities
to help start-ups
develop and go
to market with the
right product.
Media costs
Growth media is
estimated to account
for 50-90%
of production
costs of cultured
meat, so efforts
are underway
to reduce these
costs, which will
ultimately make
cultivated meat products more affordable.
Last October, for example,
Mosa Meat (Maastricht; www.
mosameat.com) and Nutreco N.V.
(Amersfoort, both the Netherlands;
www.nutreco.com)
were awarded
nearly €2-million funding from the
European REACT-EU recovery assistance
program to advance cellular
agriculture and bring cultivated beef
to the E.U. market. The funding for
this " Feed for Meat " project is being
used to address the " basal " or base
media in which beef cells grow. By
moving away from pharmaceuticalgrade
products and instead using
feed- and food-grade byproducts
from Nutreco's supply chain, Mosa
Meat believes
it can substantially
lower costs of basal media. Mosa
Meat introduced the world's first
cultivated beef burger in 2013, and
has since received backing from
Blue Horizon, Bell Foods Group, Nutreco,
Mitsubishi Corp., Leonardo
DiCaprio, and others.
In a related project, Meatable
(Delft; www.meatable.com) entered
a joint-development agreement last
September with Royal DSM N.V.
(Heerlen, both the Netherlands;
www.dsm.com) to develop growth
media for cultivated meat.
Last December, Wacker Chemie
AG (Munich, Germany; www.
wacker.com) entered a partnership
with Aleph Farms (Rehovot, Israel;
www.aleph-farms.com) to develop
streamlined
production
processes
for growth medium proteins, which
" we believe are key to bringing down
the overall cost of cultivated products, "
says Oliver Minge, head of
Future Meat Technologies
FIGURE 3. An inside view of the the first industrial cultured meat facility in
Rehovot, Israel
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
APRIL 2022
http://www.upsidefoods.com http://www.mosameat.com http://www.nutreco.com http://www.shiokmeats.com http://www.meatable.com http://www.givaudan.com http://www.mgb.ch http://www.dsm.com http://www.wacker.com http://www.aleph-farms.com http://www.bluenalu.com http://WWW.CHEMENGONLINE.COM
Chemical Engineering April 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Chemical Engineering April 2022
