Beyond the question of its authorization for sale in various global markets, one challenge facing the lab-grown meat industry lies in producers' ability to find solutions for manufacturing these alternatives on a large scale. In Israel, one company may have found an answer, thanks to an unexpected ingredient: tobacco!
Israel is a place where the concept of lab-grown meat has begun to develop and take shape. The start-up Aleph Farms is one of the very first laboratories to have communicated about creating cultivated meat from stem cells. But you have to head out of the Tel Aviv area, where this new production method has been attracting curiosity since its inception in 2017, to the northern border with Lebanon to discover the latest twist in the tale of lab-grown meat. Welcome to BioBetter, a startup specializing in the growth factors necessary for the cellular development of cultivated meat. Founded by a researcher from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the company offers an economical alternative to those who hope to commercialize cultured meat products, and all by growing tobacco plants.
Before becoming a piece of meat, cells need amino acids, nutrients, but also growth factors in order to reproduce. Growth factors can be very expensive components of this process. As such, the key to large-scale production potentially lies in the simple fact of moving away from using fetal serum sourced from slaughterhouses. "Companies are currently working to find a more ethical and less expensive solution without bovine fetal serum," Jean-François Hocquette of France's INRAE research center told ETX Studio earlier this year. Now, this private company is keen to laud the economic merits of its technology, stating that the production of these growth factors costs only one dollar per gram.
Israel has become a major focal point for research into meat alternatives. According to French financial newspaper, Les Echos, the country is home to 10% of the companies working in this field worldwide. The companies involved invested more than $500 million in 2021, the largest sum after American start-ups (about $700 million).
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