Aleph Farms and the Mitsubishi Corporation's Food Industry Group have agreed to move toward marketing cultured meat in Japan. The two companies have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in which Aleph Farms will provide its BioFarm technology and Mitsubishi will provide technical support as well as manufacturing and distribution facilities.
The idea of cultured meat has been garnering a lot of attention recently as the technology continues to mature. The basic concept is to avoid the environmental and ethical concerns that surround raising livestock for meat by cultivating individual animal cells to produce meat products. However it hasn't been an easy task to achieve.
The main difficulty is that meat is more than a collection of muscle cells. It's actually a very complex assemblage of exercised tissues and organic compounds that gives it a distinct color, flavor, and texture that is very different from the pale, flaccid pap that the first cultivated meat cells looked like in a Petri dish. The other difficulty is scaling up production while bringing down costs.
Over the past few years, cultured meat products have gone from a hamburger that cost a small fortune, to chicken nuggets that never hatched from an egg, to a Aleph Farms' own lab-grown minute steak. Cultured chicken has already been cleared to go on sale in Singapore and now the new agreement between Aleph Farms and Mitsubishi aims at bringing cultured meat to the Japanese market.
The goal is to combine Aleph Farm's advanced techniques with Mitsubishi's Food Group's ability to provide a complete logistical chain, from procuring raw materials through manufacturing and distribution. The end goal is to bring meat to the table that has net-zero carbon dioxide emissions along the entire supply chain and at a reasonable price.
"The cooperation demonstrates Aleph Farms' strategy of working together with the food and meat industries to ensure a successful integration of cultivated meat within the ecosystem, while maximizing the positive impact we make," says Didier Toubia, Co-Founder and CEO of Aleph Farms. "We are excited to bring cultivated meat production closer to the Japanese market."
Source: Aleph Farms