Science

Aleph Farms and Mitsubishi team up to bring cultured meat to Japan

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Aleph Farms and Mitsubishi will work to market cultured meat in Japan
Aleph Farms
Aleph Farms and Mitsubishi will work to market cultured meat in Japan
Aleph Farms
Aleph Farms has produced the world's first cultured steak
Aleph Farms

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.

The world's first lab-grown steak takes about three weeks to grow from an initial cellular sample
Aleph Farms

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

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2 comments
DaveWesely
When are we going to deal with the ethical concerns of allowing other symbiotic predator/prey relationships in the wild? Damn those predators! /s BTW, if you eliminate domesticated methane producing ruminants on grasslands, they will naturally be replaced by wild methane producing ruminants.
buzzclick
The thought of eating tofurkey and other mystery meats that have been cleverly combined/created for vegan or other conscious peoples' tastes gives me the creeps. Just eat less/or no meat. There's so much wonderful and tasty non-animal food out there to discover.