Technology

Are consumers ready for meat grown in a lab?

Companies like Memphis Meats, Aleph Farms, Higher Steaks, Mosa Meat and Meatable are all trying to bring to supermarkets around the world meat made from cultivated animal cells, but the problem has always been the cost.

Now, Future Meat Technologies has raised $14 million in new financing to build its first pilot manufacturing facilities to bring the cost of production of a cell-made steak down to $10 per pound — or $4 if the meat is combined with plant-based meat substitutes.

The $10 price tag is a whole lot lower than the $50 target that experts from the Good Food Institute were talking about back in April of this year — and represents a significant cost reduction that makes lab-grown meat a potentially commercially viable option much sooner than anyone expected.

&With this investment, we&re thrilled to bring cultured meat from the lab to the factory floor and begin working with our industrial partners to bring our product to market,& said Rom Kshuk, the chief executive officer of Future Meat Technologies, in a statement. &We&re not only developing a global network of investors and advisors with expertise across the meat and ingredient supply chains, but also providing the company with sufficient runway to achieve commercially viable production costs within the next two years.&

Unlike its other competitors, Future Meat Technologies doesn&t have any interest in selling its products directly to consumers. Rather, the company wants to be the supplier of the hardware and cell lines that anyone would need to become a manufacturer of lab-grown meat.

In a way, itnot much different to the approach that Tyson Foods — an investor in Future Meat through its venture capital arm — has taken with farmers. Tyson contracts with poultry farmers to raise the chickens that the company slaughters and processes, and provides them with the means to raise the chickens for slaughter.

Future Meat production tanks for meat and fat

The secret to Future Meatsuccess is its use of undifferentiated fibroblast cells that can be triggered with small molecules to turn into either fat cells or muscle cells. Once the fat and muscle starts growing, they&re placed in a culture with a specific resin that removes waste materials that have been an impediment to growth at large scales, according to chief science officer and founder Yaakov Nahmias.

While Future Meat doesn&t rely on fetal bovine serum to grow its meat products, it does use small molecules derived from CHO cells (Chinese hamster ovaries), which are used in new medical research and drug manufacturing.

&We have a specific resin to remove the toxins from the media and that allows the cells to continue to grow,& says Nahmias. &It is essentially a new bioreactor design… you can increase the yield to 80%.. For every liter of medium you don&t get 100 grams of biomass you can get 800 grams of biomass… [and] you don&t talk about mega $100 million factories.&

Nahmias says using a refrigerator-sized bioreactor, a manufacturer could get about half a ton of meat and fat in about 14 days. In about one month, growers can make an amount of meat equivalent of two cows& worth of meat (a cow takes about 12 to 18 months to raise for slaughter).

The former Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor first began thinking about the lab-grown meat business while on sabbatical. &It was at a PeetCoffee right next to the Charles River in Cambridge,& Nahmias recalled. &Somebody asked me what I thought about cultured meat… They asked me what I thought about it and I told them it was the stupidest idea I had ever heard in my entire life.&

Growing cells is expensive, Nahmias said at the time, and the fact that the organisms basically grow in their own excrement means that they can&t reproduce effectively to reach any kind of large scale. Thatwhen Nahmias had his &Eureka& moment. &You need cells that grow without any growth factor at all,& says Nahmias. &The only cells that can do that are the least differentiated cells, which are fibroblasts.&

With the new financing from investors — including S2G Ventures, a Chicago-based venture firm (and an early investor in Beyond Meat); Emerald Technology Ventures, a Swiss investment firm; Tyson Ventures (one of the most active strategic investors); and Bits x Bites (a Chinese investor in food and agriculture startups) — Future Meat can now test its business model and manufacturing capabilities at scale.

Future Meat leadership, Dr. Moria Shimoni, EVP of R-D; Yaakov Nahmias, CTO and founder; and Rom Kshuk, CEO

&You&re either growing fat or you&re growing muscle of a specific species,& says Nahmias. &Imagine a large truck going to that facility. [It&s] replacing the meat packing plant. From there the biomass goes through a process like extrusion. You can have thousands of these mass producing units. [It&s] going to a central facility where the meat comes out at the end. What we are doing is looking for parity and cost.&

For Nahmias, the fatthe thing that brings the flavor for everything. &The fat gives you the aroma and the distinct flavor of meat,& says Nahmias. &This is the missing ingredient in Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat .&

Nahmias envisions products that are made using a combination of Future Meatlab-grown products and plant proteins that can approximate the full flavors of beef, chicken or lamb (all meats that the company says it is working with).

All Nahmias wants is for Future Meat to get to market; the founder doesn&t care whether thatunder Tysonbrand or anyone else&s. &I want to be the largest company you&ve never heard of,& says Nahmias. &I want to make a product that is more sustainable and more cost-efficient, and is better for everybody.&

Like all of the other companies pursuing alternatives to animal husbandry, Future Meat, which was only founded last year, has a mission to reduce the environmental impact of meat eating. The company argues that its manufacturing model will reduce land use by 99% and emit 80% less greenhouse gas than traditional meat production.

&This continues our investment in Future Meat Technologies, which is focused on disruptive technologies related to our core business,& said Amy Tu, president of Tyson Ventures, in a statement. &We are broadening our exposure to alternative ways of producing protein to feed a growing world population.&

Ultimately the goal is getting to cost parity with regular beef. The company thinks a hybrid product could be $3 to $4, while the 100% biomass product would be roughly $10.

&We&re taking a yes and ‘Yes and& as opposed to an either-or approach to the space,& says Matthew Walker, a managing director at S2G Ventures. &You will have animal-based meat, plant-based meat and you will have hybrid products. Itmore about the supply chain and the technological products that would bring this product to market. We think thereroom in the market for somebody to play that role.&

Nahmias and Kshuk think thatthe role Future Meat Technologies was born to play.

Apple is rolling out a new opt-in notice for Siri audio sample review with the beta of iOS 13.2. This new opt-in feature was promised back in August after reports that audio from Siri requests were being reviewed by contractors and that the audio could contain sensitive or personal information.

Apple had previously halted the grading process entirely while it updated the process by which it used the audio clips to &improve Siri.&

The new process will include an explicit opt-in for those users who want to have clips of commands transmitted to Apple to help improve how well Siri understands commands.

The update is out in beta foriPadOS 13.2, iOS 13.2, Apple tvOS 13.2, WatchOS 6.1 and MacOS 10.15.1.

Some particulars of the new policy include:

• An explicit opt-in.
• Only Apple employees will be reviewing audio clips, not contractors.
• Computer generated transcripts are continuing to be used for all Siri users. These are in text form with no audio. They have been disassociated from identifying information by use of a random identifier.
• These text transcripts, which Apple says include a small subset of requests may be reviewed by employees or contractors.
• Any user can opt-out at any time at Settings > Privacy > Analytics and Improvements, turn off &Improve Siri and Dictation.&

Apple is also launching a new Delete Siri and Dictation History feature. Users can go to Settings>Siri and Search>Siri History to delete all data Apple has on their Siri requests. If Siri data is deleted within 24 hours of making a request, the audio and transcripts will not be made available to grading.

The new policies can be found at Settings>Privacy>Analytics and Improvements>About Siri in the iOS 13.2 beta. A key section details how these segments are used:

If one of your Siri or Dictation interactions is selected for review, the request, as well as the response Siri provided, will be analyzed to determine accuracy and to generally improve Siri, Dictation, and natural language processing functionality in Apple products and services. Depending on the context of your request, Apple employees may review Siri Data directly relevant to the request, in order to grade the effectiveness of Siriresponse. Only Apple employees, subject to strict confidentiality obligations, are able to access audio interactions with Siri and Dictation.

There seems to be a solid set of updates here for Siri protections and user concerns. The continued use of text transcripts that may be reviewed by contractors is one sticky point — but the fact that they are text, anonymized and separated from any background audio may appease some critics.

These were logical and necessary steps to make this process more clear to users — and to get an explicit opt-in for people who are fine with it happening.

The next logical update, in my opinion, would be a way for users to be able to see and hear the text and audio that Apple captures from their Siri requests. If you could see, say, your last 100 requests in text or by clip — the same information that may be reviewed by Apple employees or contractors, I think it would go a long way to dispelling the concerns that people have about this process.

This would fit with Applestated policy of transparency when it comes to user privacy on their platforms. Being able to see the same things other people are seeing about your personal data — even if they are anonymized — just seems fair.

Dyson said it will end its electric vehicle project after determining it could not make the car commercially viable or find a buyer.

The company, known for its high-tech vacuum cleaners and fans, said in a statement Thursday that its automotive team had developed a fantastic car, but decided to close the project. Dyson also sought a buyer for the project, but has been unsuccessful so far, the company said in the statement.

Dyson announced in September 2017 that it was working ona battery electric vehicle with an all-electric drivetrain that would be launched by 2020. The companyboard approved in October 2018 a decision to construct its first advanced automotive manufacturing facility in Singapore. The two-story manufacturing facility was scheduled for completion in 2020.

Dyson isn&t totally abandoning technology related to electric cars, and says itstill committed to Singapore. The company will continue its £2.5 billion ($3.1 billion) investment program into new technology and plans to focus on manufacturing solid-state batteries and developing sensing technologies, vision systems, robotics, machine learning and AI, company founder James Dyson wrote in the statement.

&Our battery will benefit Dyson in a profound way and take us in exciting new directions,& he wrote, adding that the companyinvestment appetite is undiminished and it will continue to deepen its roots in both the U.K. and Singapore.

Dyson said the closure was not a product failure, or a failure of the team. The company is looking to find alternative roles for employees who worked on the project and has enough vacancies in its home business to absorb most of these people, according to Dyson.

&Since day one we have taken risks and dared to challenge the status quo with new products and technologies,& Dyson wrote in the statement. &Such an approach drives progress, but has never been an easy journey — the route to success is never linear. This is not the first project which has changed direction and it will not be the last. I remain as excited about the future of Dyson as I have always been; our ambitions have never been higher, our ability to invest has never been greater, and the team has never been stronger.&