Lab-Grown Chicken Startup SuperMeat Could Disrupt The Entire Meat Market
By Simona Shemer, NoCamels
If a piece of chicken was created in a lab, independently of an animal’s body, would it still taste like chicken? Yes, says SuperMeat, an Israeli producer of lab-grown poultry extracted from the stem cells of a live chicken. The Israeli food startup also says it would help provide solutions to some of the world’s biggest food issues like the high cost of production, pollution from animal emissions, animal cruelty, and world hunger.
While it might take up to three years before the lab-made clean chicken meat that SuperMeat produces actually hits supermarket shelves, the food industry seems ready to have its animal protein market disrupted — if the company’s investors have anything to say about it. SuperMeat has raised just over $3 million in seed funding at the beginning of January 2018.
Leading the Tel Aviv-based company’s most recent funding round was US-based venture capital firms New Crop Capital and Stray Dog capital. German poultry producer PHW also participated in the round, forming a strategic partnership, perhaps to add to its current vegan range under the Weisenhof brand. Ido Savir, SuperMeat CEO, and co-founder told TechCrunch after the announcement that PHW’s investment “is proof that the food industry is ready to embrace new technology, specifically in enabling food production to further scale and in a more sustainable way,” the tech site reported.
SuperMeat co-founder and COO Shir Friedman also tells NoCamels the company will use the funds to accelerate their R&D and focus on the scale-up of their company — moving it from lab-scale to commercial scale. It will also help to increase their food engineering efforts as well as their marketing and distribution of their clean meat products.
