Thursday, April 08, 2021

Edmonton startup aims to make lab-grown meat more affordable
Kashmala Fida 
CBC
4/7/2021

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© David Parry/Pool/Reuters Dutch scientist Mark Post shows off the world's first lab-grown beef burger during a launch event in London in August 2013.

An Edmonton startup working on ways to make lab-grown meat cheaper to produce recently received $2.2 million in seed funding from U.S venture capital firms and investors.

Future Fields, founded by Matt and Jalene Anderson-Baron and Lejjy Gafour, has developed a much cheaper form of growth factor — media needed for cells to grow and multiply — for producing cultured meat.

"You can think of that very much like the feed for the cells, just like animals need feed to to grow, cells need to to grow and multiply and ultimately become these meat products," Matt Anderson-Baron told CBC's Edmonton AM.

"So we make that ingredient, which is traditionally very, very expensive and not very scalable."

Cultured meat, or meat grown in a lab using in vitro cell cultures, was first produced in 2012 by Dutch scientist Mark Post. That first patty, made public in 2013, cost $300,000 to produce.

Although costs for the growth media have come down considerably, they still run at least $500 per litre. Using their method, Anderson-Baron hopes to reduce the price to less than $1 per litre at full scale.

Around the world, 60 companies are working on lab-grown meat, although only one company — in Singapore — is successfully selling products commercially on a very small scale.



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