Produce Animal Fat without Animals: A Startup is born from Plant Oil Alternatives!

Yasmin Yasmin
March 1, 2021
0

Want to find interesting topics in cell biology? Listen to this one: ” Hoxton Farms raises £2.7M seed to produce animal fat without animals“. This project will cultivate animal fat and solve an urgent issue for the rapidly growing meat alternatives market. Read more about it and try to get biological ideas from this creative food science project.

Benefits of the interesting topics in cell biology

By this startup, approach biology scientists deliver the missing ingredient necessary in the meat alternative industry. In these past years, meat alternatives were produced but they were not tasty at all. Now by this animal fat production in the laboratory meat alternatives have become delicious, realistic, and versatile.

Fat is all we need.

Fat is the single most important ingredient in meat. The new method allows scientists to customize fat for any application. This new fat is healthy and can develop the functional properties of meat alternatives.

Before the new fat

Previously food engineers had challenges finding a replacement for traditional animal fat. In most finding ere problems that didn`t match these factors:

effectiveness
low-cost
sustainability
sensory properties

Why is fat so important?

To get the point better, Fat defines the physical and sensory properties of meat; like:

the look of the meat
the taste of the milk

These properties cannot be replicated by plant oils which previously used in the formulation of meat alternatives.

Does meat alternative worth it?

take a look at these stats to get the demand for meat alternatives and new kind of fat production:

15 percent of greenhouse gas is from Animal agriculture from emissions.
30 percent of habitable land and freshwater is in the use of animal agriculture.
Demand for plant-based meat has raises to 125 percent in the last two years.
The global meat alternative will be worth $8.15Bn by 2026.

What is the problem with plant oils?

These oils used in the alternative meat industry had two serious consequince:

enormous environmental impact
making plant-based meat greasy and unpalatable

The Solution that Hoxton Farms made

This research-based farm is working to solve the fat problem of meat alternatives. The researchers in this startup are using cultivated fat which is so important in the taste and performance of the meat.

The story of the startup

Hoxton Farms started to grow purified animal fat in cultivators, the big problem was that the process was so expensive and difficult to scale. So the startup team is solving the problem by using new Mathematical Modellings to lower the costs.

Ed Steele, Co-Founder explains that They have simulated the entire process computationally, from biopsy to bacon. This “digital twin” allows them to optimise every raw input in parallel, massively improving the cost-efficiency and performance of our cultivated fat for our customers.

interesting cell biology topics - production of animal fat in labratory

The founders’ background

The founders met at nursery school over 25 years ago and have been friends ever since.

Dr Max Jamilly: A synthetic biologist and formerly part of Legendairy Foods.
Ed Steele: A mathematician and former machine learning engineer at Thought Machine

They teamed up in 2020 to combine their expertise and build Hoxton Farms against the backdrop of the pandemic.

The team believes that the Covid-19 crisis has exposed the fragility of traditional meat supply chains and the risks they pose to human health and the environment.

The future of Hoxton Farm

The Hoxton team wants to use their skills to address a pressing problem: how to satisfy a growing demand for meat without compromising on health, sustainability or animal ethics? Hoxton Farms will use this seed investment to develop a proof of concept of its production platform and build customer partnerships, helping the startup to achieve its goal of supplying cultivated fat to the global meat alternatives industry.

The story of the investment

Hoxton Farms has received investment from the leading Silicon Valley VC Founders Fund, founded by Peter Thiel, alongside Backed, Presight Capital, CPT Capital, Sustainable Food Ventures, and angel investors.

At the end

Meanwhile, Hoxton Farms’ early customers will be plant-based meat companies who seek a more sustainable and flavorsome alternative to plant oils. Much further into the future, the startup will target cultivated meat companies that grow muscle cells but still need a source of fat, and other industries, such as bakery, confectionery and cosmetics.

Source: teckcrunch – synbiobeta

Bad lifestyle habits during the pandemic.

Chemical Recycling of Mixed Waste Plastics Research Scholarship.