Welcome to Pluripotent — it’s Thursday, August 6th, and I’m writing this abbreviated post from a quiet, socially-distanced car on the Amtrak, as I’m en route to spend a few days in Provincetown. Feel free to send tips through direct message and follow me @chasepurdy.
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE N.E. CORRIDOR — Some interesting news emerged from Silicon Valley this week, as cell-cultured meat company Mission Barns announced its plans to give curbside taste tests of its cultured bacon later this month.
The company, which was co-founded in 2018 by two former JUST employees, Eitan Fischer and David Bowman, spent the last couple years focusing on growing pork fat. Now the startup is looking for interested eaters to sign up for the opportunity to sample its bacon at two restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area during a week in August. The tasting will be free for participants.
The news is interesting for a few reasons, but two I find particularly striking.
Scale-up.
Fischer has said a breakthrough at the company earlier this year gives the scientists there an avenue to "scale this up to the tons scale, and every month we've been making this in larger and larger cultivator systems." Even though the product will not be a 100% cultured meat product, and even though it will not involve growing muscle tissue, it’s still an impressive step forward for a company to be able to produce a product by the ton.
Enter the hybrid.
My own reporting on this subject showed me that not all startups in this space are interested in making hybrid products, which are comprised of both plant-based and cell-cultured ingredients. In fact, at least one told me it could be potentially damaging for the whole field because it adds an extra communications hurdle when trying to convey to consumers what cultured meat actually is. If people have been expecting cell-cultured meat, what happens when the first products they try aren’t, in fact, fully cell-cultured meats?
I am not under the impression that this concern is held by a majority of companies in this space. In fact, most CEOs that I’ve spoken with about this have said it’s a natural progression for the cultured meat field, which hasn’t yet grown muscle tissue at tremendous scale. It offers a relatively cheap way to create meat alternatives, one in which the plant material can offer much of the same texture and mouthfeel of conventional meat, while the cultured fat can deliver the flavor profile that people are used to tasting.
It will be interesting to hear feedback from Mission Barns’ taste-testers. And I look forward to watching how people receive the idea of hybrid products.